End Times series

The only just distribution is merit-based. Meritocracy thus embraces a plausible and widely-endorsed (in word, if not always in deed) egalitarian idea: equality of opportunity. But it rejects egalitarian distributive rules, as they fail to recognize merit. On the other hand, many libertarians are driven by an affection for personal responsibility. Meritocrats are too—but we argue that a society, like Nozick’s, in which the children of the wealthy have enormous advantages, and people become rich and powerful for reasons other than merit, is not a responsible one. Meritocracy takes personal responsibility more seriously than libertarianism does. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Thomas Mulligan.

The sceptical dialectic Kripke developed differed from [Wittgenstein's] both rhetorically and in detail, but its thrust was, at least as I read it, essentially the same: that we have no usable conception of what meanings are that allows for ongoing linguistic practice in accordance with them to be a fully objective matter, constituted independently of what we count as competent use but nevertheless still knowable by us.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Crispin Wright.

To start with, it’s good to be semantically aware so as not to be taken in by equivocation and other fallacies in philosophical arguments. And of course there are philosophical questions about language, such as the nature of reference or meaning, that people have made claims about by means of analyses of the semantics of particular words and constructions, such as names and propositional attitude ascriptions.There is also arguably a connection between semantics and ontology, a tantalizing possibility that doing semantics might be able to deliver insights into ontology.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Paul Elbourne.

Some would say that meta-ethics is inquiry into the metaphysics of moral properties, the semantics of moral expressions, the psychology of moral judgment, and the epistemology of the moral realm. I’d prefer to characterize meta-ethicists as trying to fit ethics and ethical inquiry into a more general account of the world and our ways of understanding it. There are many paths into meta-ethics. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Andrew Sepielli

As far as I know, the Everettian Wentaculus is the first realistic physical theory that achieves strong determinism. If strong determinism is shown to be possible and can be achieved with sufficient simplicity, we have to reconsider several issues in philosophy of science. The first issue concerns naturalness in metaphysics. An influential argument, due to David Lewis, that our definition of natural laws requires the notion of perfect naturalness, would be unsound if strong determinism is possible. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Eddy Keming Chen.

Aristotle thinks that human beings have an ultimate end or highest good, happiness ( eudamonia ). And he thinks that, to grasp happiness’s content, we should consider activities that are such as to be chosen for themselves and not for the sake of particular higher ends. Philosophical contemplation, Aristotle thinks, is the activity that most of all has this end-like character, at least when compared with other activities. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Matthew D. Walker

The laws of truth are laws which hold solely by virtue of what being true is as such. That’s what it means. That serves as a guide to a search for the laws: to get to the law-like behaviour of being true, you have to strip away a log of variables which are not part of what being true is as such. (So far, there is a parallel with the laws of mechanics: laws of motion, independent of, say, colour and shape. Frege goes through a series of abstractions (separating-outs) to get at this. One important point is this: the laws of thought govern logical forms, and primarily the phenomenon of truth-transmission (by virtue of form alone). Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Charles Travis

Democracy is definitively in trouble everywhere. This was one of the main motivations to write the book. But, things have only gotten worse since I published it. Page and Gilen’s empirical study showing that the US is technically an ‘oligarchy’ (and not a democracy) was alarming enough at the time, but the possibility that the US may no longer be a democracy in a minimal sense of peacefully transferring power based on uncontested elections is an even more worrisome development. The current global crisis of democracy stems from a variety of factors but a common thread is that citizens are losing their political power because too many “shortcuts” have been instituted that allow powerful actors to make political decisions while bypassing the citizenry. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Cristina Lafont

To give you a sense of what Zhu thought and wrote about in depth, I can start by distinguishing between the issues that are frequently discussed in the recent secondary literature and then turn to some issues that really interested him and his contemporaries but are less often discussed nowadays. There is a lot of secondary literature on Zhu’s views about the vexed relationship between qi (vital stuff, which occupies space and time) and Li (metaphysical Patterns or principles that account for or explain order, norms, and intelligibility). And there must be a small library of secondary scholarship on his understanding of the first three steps or items in the process of cultivating the self, as described in the canonical Confucian text known as the Great Learning. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Justin Tiwald

In the narrative of The Shadow of God Fichte is absolutely key. In his Lectures on the Scholar’s Vocation he picks up Kant’s idea of the Church Invisible, that humanity is engaged in a joint project of the realization of justice, and makes it into a this-worldly conception of historical immortality. What matters about human beings is not their material existence, which is finite, but the part they play in the shared project of human self-realization. Similar ideas are around elsewhere at that time, for example, in Herder, and in Saint-Just, when he says that he “despises the dust from which he’s born” but that he lives for posterity. One of the main objectives of my book is to make it clear how far this idea of “historical immortality” is part of the ether of modernity. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Rosen

it seems to me that if we want to get at “metaphysical structure” we need to say something about what kind of thing that could be and how it relates to the logic of truths, and this has to go beyond just appealing to naturalism or the continuity of philosophy with natural science. Just appealing (for example) to primitive “naturalness” or “carving at the joints” doesn’t seem to me to say much. I’m also not sure we’re trying to find out “facts about the world” or what that would mean, if it’s not what physicists or other natural scientists are supposed to be doing, rather than philosophers or logicians. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Paul Livingston

It is useful to think of the theory of rational action as saying that the rationality of an action is a function of two things: what evidence you have and what your preferences are. Thus, if you prefer excitement to boredom, and according to your evidence option A promises more excitement than any of your other options, then it is rational for you to choose A. Psychologism, Factualism and my own Experientialism are different theories of evidence, and so when you plug them into that framework they may well give different answers to what the rational action is in any given case. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Juan Comesaña.