End Times series

I don’t intend to criticize any particular theory of truth. Theories of truth are attempts to establish a distinction between true and false which transcends the mere distinctions between opinions of proponents and opponents. They are attempts to entrench the idea of truth into our argumentation. The correspondence theory is one of the oldest and most successful truth theories and like all the other ones it is not self-applicable: When a proponent of the correspondence theory says that this theory is false, if it does not correspond to reality, then the principle of correspondence is still preserved. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Josef Mitterer

I like the Stag Hunt and I think it deserves more attention than Prisoner’s Dilemma, but I would not rest social contract theory on one game. A real social contract is a complex web of social norms and conventions. We can try to gain insight by isolating some classes of important social interactions, modeling them as games, and studying the games. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Brian Skyrms

Many of the alleged irreconcilable conflicts between religion and science are represented as akin to a match between a toddler and an 800-pound gorilla, with the suggestion that religion is about to be trounced once again and would be well advised to hang its head and slink away. Yet it seems to me that these conflicts invariably require supplementation by way of a piece of metaphysics that has not been adequately defended or even acknowledged. Absent the additional metaphysical thesis (which can usually be spotted doing some heavy lifting and masquerading as a bit of well-established science), it is usually possible to reconcile after all, and to do so without encroaching on the authority of genuine scientific discoveries or expertise. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Hud Hudson.

Leibniz manages to hold onto what at least he takes to be a variety of pure mechanism, while also accounting for the evident respects in which horses and fish and so on are quite different from clockworks. He does this by arguing that their structure is “mechanical to infinity”, with no possible lower limit to their decomposition, in contrast with a clock where you remove a gear or two and already you no longer have a clock at all but just a pile of pieces of metal. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Justin Erik Halldór Smith

One thing early Chinese thinkers understood well but for some reason we often struggle with in the West is that things can be and always are multiply owned, multiply constitutive. This feature can be both mine and my grandfathers—and it is mine because it is my grandfather’s. Other early traditions I work on, such as Mesoamerican Philosophy, also understood this point. I suspect that the reason this seemingly obvious and fundamental truth seems to elude us so often in the West has to do with conceptions of ownership and the rise of capitalism. The medieval West certainly understood this point well.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Alexus McLeod

Herder remains suspicious of grand philosophical systems and views them as potentially unscientific. What is of interest from the point of view of hermeneutics, though, is how he seeks to articulate a methodological, bottom-up, as he calls it, approach to understanding and insists on the need to situate the meaning of a given expression within its historical, linguistic, and cultural context. For him, this is a question that arises out of an anthropological, partly also political and cosmopolitan motivation. He offers an early discussion of prejudices, of the way in which our own cultural ideals and practices are easily ascribed an illegitimate normative status. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Kristin Gjesdal.

It’s important to remember that Zeno, the Stoic founder, writes a Republic, that looks back at Plato’s Republic . Zeno’s sense of communalism and the importance of shared humanity based on common reason, as sketched in his own Republic (only bits of which are extant) are telegraphed in remarks like these in Marcus’s Meditations: We have to work together “like feet or hands or eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth.” We are “woven together” by a “common bond,” “scarcely one thing foreign to another. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Nancy Sherman.

My view is that Locke links a moral account of personhood (rather than a moral account of personal identity) with a psychological account of personal identity. To explain why I interpret Locke this way, it is helpful to return to his kind-dependent approach to questions of identity over time. Locke’s view is that we have to spell out what we mean by ‘person’ before we can turn to questions of personal identity over time and specify the persistence conditions for persons. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ruth Boeker.

It’s not really a problem for someone to fail to be able to see the value in classical music, for instance—though we can say that they’re missing out on something, something genuinely good, if so. But there seems to be something distinctively wrong with someone who fails to be able to see what’s good about, for instance, respecting the dignity of other human beings. This sort of thing seems like it might be a demand made of everyone; there’s not obviously space for idiosyncrasy here. And if that’s right, there’s an important difference in the structure of value that tolerates idiosyncrasy as opposed to value that doesn’t, value that makes demands of everyone. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Claire Kirwin.

They were mentors—Anscombe and Foot, especially—to a lot of other women (and men). If we’re not evenly balanced yet, we’re nonetheless in a very different place from when these philosophers began their careers, and you could count on your ten fingers the number of women in philosophy in the English-speaking world. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ben Lipscomb

According to Nietzsche we interpret ourselves by self-applying the folk-psychological framework we have acquired from the society we live in. On the other hand, such frameworks are wrong. Thus, as the way in which we make sense of our mental life is based on a wrong picture of it, it does indeed turn out that our reflective awareness of it is deeply distorted. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Mattia Riccardi

Many people assume that multiculturalism is essentially an attempt to opt out of such an ethics of membership: to disavow any sense of allegiance to the larger society. But as Taylor argued in his famous essay, multiculturalism is not a disavowal of membership, but rather an avowal that there are many different ways of being a member, many different ways of belonging. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Will Kymlicka.