End Times series

My rather brutal response to this debate about what sorts of things theories and models are, what identity conditions they satisfy and so on, is to chop right through it and insist that the whole discussion got off on the wrong foot by taking theories and models to be things, of some sort, to begin with. Literally, on my view … There Are No Such Things As Theories! So, they are not abstract artefacts, inhabiting World 3, nor are they fictions, nor anything else. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Steven French

Tolerate education? You should crave it. You need to have a curious mind and want to know how human beings function, whether together or apart. Alexander the Great studied with Aristotle. Washington and Lincoln read books on their own. Rosa Parks finished her formal education but learned most of what she knew from the school of life. You don’t need to go to school to be educated, but you do need to know something about the human condition in order to be an effective leader over the long haul. Otherwise you won't know how to deal with the evils that you will have to face. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Paul B Woodruff.

All your readers are global citizens to some extent, as users of the world-wide web, which has made some forms of parochialism anachronistic, and also as holders of human rights. However there is a need for us all to educate ourselves in the needs of people and environments worldwide. Fortunately we do not all need to be conscious of our global citizenship before policies of global sustainability, such as those of the 2015 Paris Conference, can be introduced. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robin Attfield.

The term ‘Renaissance philosophy’ is particularly useless. It just does not serve any purpose. Is philosophy that starts with Petrarch in the 14thcentury the beginning of the Renaissance? No, there is nothing new that begins then. Petrarch had a certain influence on some later thinkers in the 15thand 16th centuries, but it does not make any sense to delineate a new period in history that starts then. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Henrik Lagerlund .

Motivation is key to fully appreciate why epistemic agency is continuous with cognitive agency and also why knowledge requires the world-directed and selective functions of attention. The prevalence of belief based-accounts of knowledge and propositional-attitude approaches has obscured the importance of reliable and virtuous motivation and skills in epistemology and philosophy more generally. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Carlos Montemayor

'It was already clear to me that mainstream research programs in ...[philosophy of mind].... depend for their fundamental structures on the narrower, or subjectivity-extruding, conception of objectivity. I was committed to developing an approach to mind that rejects these structures, making room for an account of mental concepts as metaphysically transparent and irreducibly ethical.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Alice Crary

Debates will remain shallow as long as proponents of restriction insist that everything that is harmful ought to be restricted while opponents insist with equal vigor that the speech is harmless. Only by accepting that some of such speech is genuinely harmful can we have a fruitful discussion of when (if ever) and why harmful speech ought to be restricted, and when (if ever) and why harmful speech ought to be protected or tolerated. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Fred Schauer

If we work with the hypothesis that the Meditations is a sustained attempt to extricate the meditator from the sensory ideology and show her that she has a more immediate basic understanding of herself, God, and body, I think much of the text falls into place. Discussions that might have otherwise seemed to be tangents, quirky, or off topic—especially if we take the topic to be answering the skeptic—start to fall into place. As important, I believe, the philosophy gets more interesting. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews John Carriero

Classifying someone with a learning disability involves a way of being a person. Those classified interact with the classifying process. Forces at work include online ‘scientific’accounts of particular disorders, health diagnoses and treatments, support groups, charities, advice for parents, and dietary advice. Those classified in a particular way, together with the relevant label applications themselves, may well undergo significant changes as a result. So Hacking’s looping effects associated with interactive kinds means that at least some learning disorder labels are ‘moving targets Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Andrew J Davis.

We need to distinguish different meanings of ‘probability’. The main distinction is between subjective probability (call it credence) and objective probability (call it chance). There’s no problem here for credence, which is what we get when we use probability theory to model the beliefs of agents. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Darren Bradley

The pamphlet she published in 1938 with her friend Norman Daniel, which opposed Britain's entry into the Second World War, cites Aquinas directly and presents arguments right out of the Summa Theologiae. But in writing Intention Anscombe kept that influence largely beneath the surface: while she's channeling Thomistic ideas consistently throughout the text, Thomas gets referenced only in a stray footnote. I think this is another main cause of the initial obscurity of the book. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews John Schwenkler.

One of the most salient features of our improving intellectual economy lies in the fact that “our pencils often prove wiser than ourselves,” as Euler is alleged to have said. By this, he means that otherwise unwarranted doodling sometimes suggests pathways of reasoning that that allow us to capture natural phenomena within our linguistic nets in fashions that we could not have anticipated beforehand. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Mark Lowell Wilson