Quine's Naturalism

I find Quine’s variant of naturalism fascinating because he is not particularly interested in these big, often very polarized, debates between naturalists and supernaturalists. Rather, he pretty much assumes that these debates have been settled and he seeks to advance our scientific worldview by showing that a truly naturalistic picture of reality also requires that we radically rethink our philosophical views about truth, justification, mind, reference, and meaning. In short, Quine argues that traditional philosophical disciplines like metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language need to be naturalized as well. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Sander Verhaegh Published on: Dec 22, 2018 @ 09:12

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Hegelian Themes

Robert Pippin is an expert on Kant, Hegel, Idealism, Nietzsche, modernism and philosophy of film. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert Pippin. Published on: Oct 6, 2018 @ 08:12

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No Fulfillment Without Anticipations and VRs Place Of Illusions

Michael Madary works on the philosophy of mind and the ethics of emerging technology, especially immersive technology such as virtual reality. His research is interdisciplinary, drawing from psychology and neuroscience. In February of 2016, he published with Thomas Metzinger the first code of ethics for research and consumer use of VR, which has received widespread media attention. In addition to the ethics of technology, he has also published widely in the philosophy of perception. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Madary.

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Existence and Consolation

African philosophers ought to bring something new to the philosophical roundtable, otherwise whatever the universalists may call ‘philosophy in Africa’ (apology to Hountondji) will go down in history as a mere footnote to Western philosophy.‘‘African philosophy is starting from scratch. We must build our own systems regardless of contemporary developments in Western philosophy. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ada Agada

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A Certain Distance

Meir Dan-Cohen is a hard-core Harvard-tough philosopher of law. He has written the books Rights, Persons and Organisations: A legal Theory for Bureaucratic Society and Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality. He is inspired by Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, and thinks that the ideas that we create create us. He thinks legal positivism is a bad thing and dignity better than autonomy. His armchair is definitely not burning. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Meir Dan-Cohen

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Psychedelics and Philosophy

Lisa Bortolotti introduced the concept of epistemic innocence to encapsulate the idea that certain intuitively suboptimal cognitive processes—like delusions, biases, and so on—can have surprisingly complex epistemic profiles. It’s not a new idea that epistemically bad cognitions can have psychological benefits; ignorance can be bliss. The new and interesting idea is that sometimes these ‘imperfect cognitions’ can also have significant, unique epistemic benefits. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall and Lindsay Jordan interview Chris Letheby.

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