End Times series

the most fruitful and successful work in economics is social science, not behavioural science. Insofar as economics has a fundamental class of phenomena to study, these have always been, and remain, markets. The concept of a market applies very broadly, to any system of networked information processing about relative marginal values of flows and stocks of resources that agents in the network seek to control. Markets of goods and services that are priced using money are only one, hugely socially important, kind of market. But where the question at hand is concerned they all have something in common: they are social phenomena. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Don Ross

I follow philosophers like Simone de Beauvoir and Stephen Darwall in emphasizing that ethical inquiry is essentially second personal. Ethical claims are calls that moral agents make upon other moral agents to limit their free choices in particular ways. When you make universal moral claims, you are effectively issuing demands upon the free agency of everyone. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Regina Rini

For me, the most interesting aspect of philosophy is the arguments. And there are arguments in metaphysics. Suppose you think that metaphysics is dumb. Then you must think that the arguments in metaphysics are dumb. Take one of those arguments. Suppose you think it has a false premise. Fair enough. That is a good reason to oppose that argument. But opposing that argument in that way is not being a critic of metaphysics, it is instead opposing a single argument. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Trenton Merricks

Many disagreements—certainly among philosophers—involve people who seem equally well-informed, equally intelligent, equally hard-working and serious, and so on. In other words, we disagree with people who seem just as well-placed as we are to form accurate beliefs on the relevant topic. Assuming we’re disagreeing about a matter that has right and wrong answers, one of us has gotten it wrong. So the question then arises: is it rational for me to believe that it’s the other person who’s wrong?' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews David Christensen

A lot of the debates in philosophy of language concern whether some philosophically interesting word (‘know’, ‘free’, cause’, ‘self’, ‘true’, etc.) is context-sensitive. There is no general consensus how to address these questions and it sometimes feels like these debates are hopeless – some claiming context-sensitivity just to solve a philosophical puzzle, others denying it just to block the solution. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Zoltán Gendler Szabó

One of the reasons to motivate wavefunction realism is that it seems to be the most suitable way of ‘interpreting the formalism’. But why do we need to start with the formalism? This amounts to try to force an ontology on the formalism. Namely to force some meaning into the symbols. Shouldn’t we instead propose an ontology first, and then an equation for it, so that we can reproduce the formalism and the experimental data? Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Valia Allori

In some cases, merely believing in a certain kind and acting in certain ways tends to give it causal efficacy. I think that race has no more biological basis than hysteria, yet by virtue of the fact that generations of people have believed in it and acted accordingly, a kind has been created in the world. This real kind has significant effects not just in the social world (e.g. rates of incarceration, income levels) but also in the biological realm (e.g. rates of type-2 diabetes and hypertension, life expectancy, susceptibility to the coronavirus). These effects might cease to obtain if we all stopped discriminating on the basis of race and we redressed past wrongs. So it’s not inconsistent to be both a realist and a social constructivist about some kinds. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Muhammad Ali Khalidi

I have written much — much too much — about nominalism. I keep trying to get away from it, but I keep being drawn back by invitations to contribute to volumes on this or that. Nominalism in modern philosophy of mathematics is the view that denies, for philosophical reasons, the truth of the standard existence theorems in the subject, beginning with Euclid's on the existence of infinitely many primes. According to this view, Wiles's proof (of Fermat's conjecture) that for n > 2 that there are no two numbers that are nth powers and whose sum is also an nth power is in one sense superfluous, since philosophy has already established that there are no numbers at all. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews John P Burgess

The “curious tension” you refer to arises from Descartes’s saying that this “me” is essentially incorporeal – a pure “thinking thing”, and his also saying that I am intimately united with my body. On the one hand Descartes wants to say that the immaterial mind is something complete and independent in its own right. This is what we have come to call ‘Cartesian dualism’. But on the other hand he wants to preserve the (traditional scholastic) idea that it is genuinely and substantially united to the body – that we are not incorporeal angelic spirits inhabiting mechanical bodies, but genuine human beings of flesh and blood. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews John Cottingham

I recommend taking a social, rather than an individual point of view when making assessments about rationality and progress. An individual’s reasons for working on a particular theory may be accidental or irrelevant (e.g. they may have found it aesthetically appealing), but it is important to the scientific community as a whole that someone is working on the theory. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Miriam Solomon

Sartre wondered too whether we could without paradox be said to repress feelings out of awareness – since it’s only if we know what they are that we can know we don’t want to have them! As these traditions have developed it, we do better to think of knowing ourselves not as a matter of a recovered inner cognition of this inner domain, a perception voiced in reports of our judgments about what we’ve found within, but instead as involving the recovery of our expressive lives– i.e. as involving the ability not to speak about, but to speak from, our feelings and wishes. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Richard T. Gipps

It seemed to me that dominant moral theories, Kant’s especially, lack nuance: we can’t declare for all circumstances what is appropriate to some. Zone moralities are contexts distinguished by their constituent relations: self-regard; loyalty to family or friends; vocational or commercial relations; or one’s relations to anyone with whom one shares a sidewalk, a state, or humanity. Virtue moralities could cover these distinctions, but they aren’t usually differentiated in ways appropriate to these differences. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews David Weissman