End Times series

The fundamental reorientation I took from Deleuze’s Nietzsche was this: life can no longer be made to appear before the categories of thought; instead, thought must be plunged into the categories of life. If the modern disease is ultimately a problem about how we think, then discovering the potencies of different ways of thinking may be the route to cure or redemption. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Philip Goodchild.

One of the chief arguments behind abandoning the attempt to define art is that n (take your pick about a number to replace n) years of debate has not led to consensus or has led to a standoff. I think that is a terrible argument. Since when do we get consensus on any big issue in philosophy? Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert Stecker.

The understanding and appreciation of these ideas, which the French achieved by means of their painful experience living under Nazi occupation, also undoubtedly helps to explain the ascendency of Sartrean existentialism in post-World War II France. But the contemporary relevance of Sartre is revealed in the recognition that the same conditions and principles also apply to us today, especially those of us who are privileged to be able to live relatively comfortable lives. Our choices and actions also can, and frequently do, dramatically affect the lives of others. Our choices are important. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews David J Detmer

The U.S. Constitution may have been a model for government systems a hundred years ago, but now it’s more like a funky Leibnizian calculating machine that nobody sensible has any interest in except as a historical oddity. I say that it’s too much because it has silly, imaginary “rights” bandied about in it as if they were real, but that it’s also too little because the things that do require absolute protection, like freedom of political speech and association, are guaranteed only against encroachments by the U.S. government. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Walter Horn

Aristotle wrote illuminatingly in the Nicomachean Ethics about what he calls the vice of alazony ( alazoneia). The alazôn , the person who suffers from alazony, is the kind of person who exaggerates his credentials. He (the gendered nature of the vice is worth noting) is self-important, self-promoting, narcissistic, boastful. The problem is not that such people make the wrong choice of ends, nor even that they select the wrong means for achieving them. Rather it is that they have a settled disposition to behave like this: alazoneia is in their character, and this is what we dislike in them. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Richard Smith

I argue that a future person being me consists in that future person having experiences which I will experience; and so the identity of me does not consist in what happens to my body, but in what happens to my conscious life, and so I am who I am in virtue of what happens to my conscious life. Nothing that happens in my body entails or is entailed by what happens to my conscious life. So being me must consist in being a substance separate from my body. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Richard Swinburne

Dennett can be a bit sketchy at times but he once called himself (in a response to me) a deflationist. He wants to deflate exotic and badly supported claims, not deny the existence of anything. Take his famous rejection of qualia. He certainly did not deny that philosophers are talking about something real when they talk about qualia, that experiences are like something to have. He just thinks that calling this whatever-it-is a quale is a poor idea. Built into the idea of qualia are many claims that are just not true of actual conscious states. So find a better word. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Andrew Brook

One idea that I think is salient about my work for modern philosophy is that it is often not a good idea to simplify the history of ideas in order to fit a modern agenda. If it did some good to vilify Aristotle, then maybe this was a necessary moment in the feminist dialectic with an intellectual tradition that was certainly largely pernicious to women. But getting things wrong and fundamentally wrong about philosophers’ views does not serve anyone’s interest and seriously undermines the credibility of those who do this. It takes away the richness of our intellectual traditions. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Sophia M Connell

I find no good reason to think that philosophers today do philosophy better than philosophers 600 or 2000 years ago, or that someone who decides to tackle metaphysical or epistemological questions in dialogue with, say, Quine is going to fare any better than those who prefer to do it in dialogue with Aristotle or Aquinas. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ana Maria Mora Marquez

I think this is a mistake and argue for a realist interpretation of Spinoza on which the metaphysical order mirrors an epistemic or conceptual order but is neither reduced to nor grounded in it. Rather, the melding of epistemic and metaphysical notions is just what you’d expect from a rationalist and a realist: the world has a certain structure and reason is up to the task of representing that structure. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Martin Lin

Our job as philosophers is to seek the truth with intellectual honesty and all available rigor. It’s fine if some of us work in highly technical fields that have no direct social pay-off. For example, I’m glad that we’ve made progress in areas such as formal logic and (perhaps) Gricean semantics. But I don’t believe we’re justifying ourselves as a discipline unless we provide a place within the academy – one of the few such places – where it’s possible to step back and interrogate whatever might be our culture’s fashionable beliefs of the moment. Someone needs to ask difficult questions about fashionable belief systems, whether left-wing, right-wing, or otherwise. Are they true? Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Russell Blackford

'Since Gödel had interpreted his First Incompleteness Theorem in the light of his mathematical realism, then yes, postmodernists are barking up the wrong tree. The proof shows that there is a mathematical truth—the Gödel sentence—that is not provable within the system. He’s not in any way attacking the notion of objective truth in mathematics. Quite the contrary.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Rebecca Newberger Goldstein .