End Times series

The sciences of wellbeing such as positive psychology and happiness economics, rose in the last thirty years on the coattails of the waning influence of traditional economics, the rise of data-driven self-help, and the enthusiasm about evidence-based policy. These trends have inevitably shaped the field, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Anna Alexandrova.

Herder is not a usual naturalist, whatever one thinks it means, nor does he call himself one, since it is a term that becomes current only in the late nineteenth century. I don’t claim to be able to say what naturalism is always and everywhere, but I identify three respects in which Herder is a naturalist – all of which, I think, characterize (more or less) positions that some philosophers who call themselves naturalists today would hold, to some degree or another. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Rachel Zuckert.

Solitude might be Nietzsche's most innovative conception in virtue theory. When I started the book, I didn't plan to write about it at all, but some of my colleagues suggested taking a look. This is where the distant-reading method paid off. I realized that, for him, solitude is a disposition that manifests in particular in the context of intra-group and inter-group relations. The person who embodies solitude is disposed to look for, point out, and ridicule the most contemptible aspects of their ingroup, especially if it's an unelective rather than elective affinity (e.g., family, nationality). Nietzsche does this all the time, for instance when he rags on the Germans while praising other nationalities and ethnicities. In a sense, it's the collective version of what he celebrates in the pathos of distance and having a sense of humor. With those two, one is able to laugh at and ridicule (aspects of) the I . With solitude, one is able to laugh at and ridicule aspects of the we . Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Mark Alfano.

Science is not just a useful device for making predictions, but rather aims to describe and explain the world, and it often succeeds. Evidence that science does succeed sometimes in achieving truth include the many successful technological applications of science, for example the role of electrons in modern machines. Other signs of truth accomplishment include the wide consensus that operates in many advanced areas of science, and the effective role of experiment in sometimes overturning established theories. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Paul Thagard

We claim that a goodly segment of the public is offended and harmed by today’s public sculpture. We think these harms are akin in structure, though perhaps not in degree, to the harms said to be caused by the public display of pornography. Merely seeing pornographic depictions of events offends many people; likewise, a good deal of today’s public sculpture offends the public eye—witness the letters, petitions, litigation and vandalism directed against this art in public. The public display of pornography is also claimed to have a negative effect on some people when they reflect upon it. If one is a woman, one is humiliated by the depiction of women as simply objects of lust. Analogously, viewing public sculpture and finding it ugly or silly or simply commonplace, the average person’s eye and mind are brought into conflict with the judgement of the aesthetic and political authorities. The citizen is likely to feel either aesthetically incompetent or the butt of a joke played at his or her expense.' Richard Marshall interviews Douglas Stalker

Homeopathic medicines are prepared by successively diluting the supposed active substance in a water and alcohol solution, and their claim is that the more dilute a medicine, the more potent, even if it the dilution passes the Avogardo point for molar solutions so that there is in all probability, or in fact, not even one molecule of the active substance left. According to homeopathy, nothing does something; according to chemistry, nothing does nothing. You can’t have your chemistry and homeopathy, too. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Douglas Stalker.

The transformation of Smith into a libertarian ideologue is a real travesty. One can certainly use Smith to oppose protectionism — whether in the form of tariffs or in the form of government support for particular industries – but not to oppose government support for the poor. To be sure, he does consider it a disaster for governments to micro-manage markets, and believes that broadly free markets will do more than anything else to raise the standard of living of the poor. But he consistently says that the main thing to watch out for are laws that favor “masters” over their workers, not the other way around, he never opposed the English Poor Law, and he advocated for some policies – a system of public education, especially – that would have vastly expanded what the government did on behalf of the poor.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Sam Fleischacker.

My basic take, which I'll get into below, is that in the 1780s, Kant thought that rational beings should wish to be without their inclinations, whereas in the 1790s, Kant changed his mind, and concluded that the inclinations were good in themselves. And that the reason he did this had to do with theodicy. But if you're suspicious of talk of Gods and evil, then what's at stake for you in this debate? Cntinuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert Gressis

If we were out on a fishing boat and you didn't want to put on your life jacket because you felt that "God would provide" that is your choice. But if there was a storm coming up and you wanted to break the radio because "we can count on God to rescue us" then you've put me at risk too. To me, an awful lot of science denial seems like the latter. If someone believes in Flat Earth, I guess they're not really hurting anyone but themselves (although they are contributing to a denialist culture, which does hurt others). But what about disbelief in climate change or the Covid-19 vaccine? There I think I am justified in being intolerant because someone's irrational and false beliefs are putting the rest of us at risk. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Lee McIntyre

In metaphysics, there are various disputes that come down to a choice between rival theories. These rival theories have different ideologies that, presumably, are different with respect to how well they correspond to the world’s structure. So, we should base our choice at least in part on which theory we think is most likely to have the most accurate ideology. How do we determine which that is? I favor a virtue-driven methodology. Once a dispute reaches a mature state of stability -- in the sense that the main theoretical options are coherent, their consequences have been identified, and so on -- we can compare the rival theories with respect to various theoretical virtues, features of the theory that make it more likely to be correct. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Peter Finocchiaro.

The notion of metaphysical emergence isn’t specifically tied to physics. To be sure, the notion of metaphysical emergence is initially inspired by attention to special science entities, which appear to cotemporally (i.e., synchronically but not necessarily instantaneously) depend on (typically massively complex) combinations of physical goings-on, but which also appear to be to some extent ontologically and causally autonomous—that is, to be distinct from, and distinctively efficacious as compared to, lower-level physical goings-on. But the general notion of metaphysical emergence as coupling dependence and autonomy—as between, e.g., mental states and brain (and ultimately fundamental physical) states—could in-principle apply to other purported dependence bases. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jessica Wilson

The short answer is that cancer is a very complex disease; we should not expect a science that investigates this complex disease to come up with a simple, unified theory or model that explains all there is to explain. Cancer is massively heterogeneous - both in its causes and dynamics, as well as in responses to therapy, progression, etc. This is illuminated by the fact that when I tell cancer scientists that I wrote a book on cancer, they typically ask me which kind of cancer (e.g., breast, bone, lung, etc.). No cancer scientist thinks that one should (or could) write a single book on cancer (in general). Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Anya Plutynski