End Times series

He came in one day, didn’t have any notes, and said, “Today, I’m going to talk about Evolutionism, Functionalism, Structural-Functionalism, Structuralism and Marxism, and their relationships. And there was a rustling in the front row and a young voice said, “Sorry, Dr Gellner, that’s tomorrow. Today, you’re giving the third lecture on Islam and Politics.” And Ernest looked and said, “Just give me a moment.” He turned away and a minute later, turned round and gave a perfect third lecture on Islam and Politics. So that’s how Ernest was. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Alan Macfarlane

If, for example, we want to understand what just immigration policy looks like, then we’re better off beginning from people’s real, lived experiences of immigration or of living in communities to which people are immigrating, rather than more abstract concerns about freedom of movement, or by trying to determine what liberalism political theory requires, or trying to determine what ethical principles liberal theory is grounded in. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Paul Neiman

Smith thinks that we evaluate both the sentiments that lead people into action, and the sentiments by which they react to things, first and foremost by way of their “fit” with what we think they ought to feel, and only secondarily by way of the consequences of what they do. This sets him sharply apart from utilitarianism – he is more distant from it than his friend Hume, for instance. Continuing the End Times series Richard Marshall interviews Sam Fleischacker

One of the main objectives of my recent work has been to rehabilitate imagination in terms of its epistemic usefulness. I think that by attending to the way that imagination works in both instructive and transcendent contexts, we can better see how imagination can be used to teach us about the world. One reason that it’s important to treat these two uses together – that we shouldn’t go incompatibilist, as it were – is that we seem to slip seamlessly from transcendent to instructive uses, and back again. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Amy Kind

In a small nutshell, there was a host of vivisection research in his era that sought to understand brain function by examining the results of experimentally induced brain damage (frogs were probably the most common model organism). Some of that research is quite gruesome, and would not pass an ethics board today! But James drew on that research in really ingenious ways, and built up an account of consciousness from there. More precisely, he built both an evolutionary and a physiological account of consciousness on the basis of this brain research. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Alexander Klein

Well, I think the point is that we never really looked at antecedent causal factors. There are sorts of stories about agency—philosophical ones, but also in popular imagination—that action comes from some place ‘deep inside’, that it stems from the exercise of special capacities or motivations that align closely to who one is. And when the pathway to these factors is broken, or other factors intervene too much, then there is no action. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert Guay

'I am a dialetheist, or glut theorist, and on that basis I also think some paraconsistent logic is correct. An example of a true contradiction is that for any set, there is always a bigger set than that (Cantor’s theorem), but also there is a set of all sets (the universe of sets) which is as big as it can be—so the universe is bigger than itself, and not. Obviously. ... Or for a more mundane example, if you quit smoking six weeks ago, then you might be both a smoker and not a smoker. Do you want a cigarette? Yes and no. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Zach Weber

I am aware, of course, that minority and, especially, indigenous people have been terribly oppressed and that it is incumbent on me to take as much care as I can to treat them with respect and consideration. However, I do not believe that I treat anyone with respect and consideration if I do not challenge them when they hold beliefs that I believe to be false. On the contrary, that is to treat people disrespectfully. I do not treat people with disrespect when I engage them in debate as equals. I do disrespect them when I defer to them even when I disagree. That is like treating them as children. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews James Young.

Adorno’s concerns about the development of a commercial “culture industry” led him to think that the Black elements of jazz and popular music are there because they’ve been appropriated or co-opted by the industry for marketing purposes. The seemingly-important musical difference between, say, Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk are really no more significant than the introduction of colored sparkles into a commercial powdered detergent in order to be able to market it as new and improved. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Theodore Gracyk.

The core idea is that concepts have a special feature. One thing can be truly conceived in a variety of ways, even when the different ways of being conceived involve partially or wholly distinct contents. To take a familiar example, suppose being physical and being mental are two different natures or fundamental ways of being a thing. Descartes thought these two kinds of natures are so different that they are incompatible: if something is physical, it can’t be mental, and vice versa. Spinoza argues that if being physical and being mental are just two different ways of conceiving one and the same thing, then a spatially extended thing could also be thinking. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Sam Newlands

Context is key in reading Rancière. His interventions are always that, interventions, logical revolts in specific contexts. He himself shows great versatility in using the same arguments and the same references differently in different contexts. His whole philosophical practice encourages us to use his ideas pragmatically depending on contexts and the aims we pursue. In France, the embrace of Anglo-American political philosophy in the 1980s corresponded with a concerted attempt to reign in left-wing forces associated more or less closely with Marxism. This was the time when the French Revolution was reinterpreted as a non-event or as a prologue to 20th century totalitarianisms, when people who were Maoists a decade earlier were burning the effigies of their youth. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jean-Philippe Deranty

Most people, when they hear about determinism, imagine the universe as a whole unfolding with physical necessity from initial conditions that were laid down shortly after the Big Bang. There’s this metaphorical origin story that has God specifying the laws and then laying down each of the particles of which the universe was made at a particular position with a particular momentum, thereby fixing everything that will ever happen over the whole history of the universe. If one is thinking in this way, then one’s own life will appear as part of this unfolding totality and it seems that its sense of restless contingency will seem an illusion. If we take physics on its own terms, however, we come away with a very different picture of what determinism entails and our own place in the causal fabric of the world. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jenann T Ismael