End Times series

My version of Naturalism simply states that our foundational, “philosophical” views are continuous with our best methods and contents of science. There, the argument is that philosophy’s survival depends on assisting scientists with the normative tasks that scientists have always engaged. By contrast, working on their own and in their typical innocence of the special sciences, philosophers have little chance of making normative recommendations that are both useful and responsible to the evidence. You can spell out Naturalism as a doctrine, and then argue that it violates all sorts of conceptual or logical constraints due to circularity or self-defeat. That is the approach most anti-naturalists take. I treat Naturalism as an empirical hypothesis whose confirmation is about as complete as doctrines like physicalism – that everything in the universe is entirely physical. Even the people who pose as physicalist critics are committed to the doctrine through their reliance on scientific practices that depend on it. The same is true of naturalism. Richard Marshall interviews J.D. Trout

Offhand, the representational arts—our understanding, appreciation and uses of them—would seem to have little in common with children’s games of make-believe. Paintings, sculptures, stories and novels play roles in our lives very different, apparently, from those involving dolls, hobby horses, and toy trucks. But a closer look reveals striking similarities, similarities in fundamental structural respects that we tend to take for granted or hardly notice. Richard Marshall interviews Kendall Walton.

Camus recognised the pitfalls of anti-colonial violence more accurately than Fanon, as were his predictions of what would come to pass if the revolution succeeded. Still, he naively and stubbornly hoped in vain that France could reform itself. On the other hand, Fanon held onto the illusory image of the glorious mujahidin until his untimely death in 1961, only a few months before the end of the war. He argues at length about the potential risks of anti-colonial struggles but fails to see how the new despots emerge not, as he argued, from the self-serving mediocre indigenous bourgeoisie that benefited from colonialism but from the ranks of the Front de libération nationale (FLN) after the more democratic wing of the movement had been silenced by both French and FLN murderousness and most especially after the murder of Fanon’s friend, Abane Ramdane, in 1957. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Pedro Tabensky

The problem of the one and the many is intrinsic to any metaphysics for several reasons. For one, there is always going to be a question, (1) how the one discipline of metaphysics related to all the other disciplines. Then, there’s the question, (2) whether there is or is not a first principle of all things. Finally, there is the question (3) how there can be a metaphysical knowledge over and above the particular branches of knowledge, each of which has is own subject matter and would seem to know whatever can be known about it. What could metaphysics add to the knowledge that a particular discipline has? Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Edward C Halper

Analytic philosophy has been the ruling paradigm in Anglophone philosophy for the better part of a century now. In combination with its sense of superiority, this disciplinary dominance has enabled analysts to marginalize other approaches. But if the analytic revolution was based merely on a sense of shared know-how that has never been sufficiently articulated or defended, then it would appear that its dominance is philosophically unjustified, that the Emperor has no clothes. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Aaron Preston

Pascal’s wager is often, at least at first blush, framed in terms of what you should believe. So, should you believe that God exists? Here’s a simplistic version of the wager: Well, if you believe in God and God exists, you’ll go to heaven, which is infinitely good. If God exists and you don’t believe in God, you may go to hell, which is infinitely bad. If God does not exist, then whether you believe in God or not, whatever you gain or lose would be finite. Thus, given this cost-benefit analysis, you should believe in God.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Liz Jackson

Ontology ... as it is used by analytical philosophers, has three meanings: (i) its original meaning, (ii) the part of philosophy that addresses such questions as, “Are there universals?”, “Are there zoological species?”, “Are there non-actual but possible people?”. In both sense (i) and sense (ii), ‘ontology’ is a mass term. In sense (iii), ‘ontology’ is a count noun: ‘Quine’s ontology includes sets, but no other abstract objects.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Peter van Inwagen.

What’s at stake are deep issues in epistemology and ethics. Most epistemologists think that whatever knowledge is, it can’t include getting the truth by luck. The common take on Gettier is that he showed even justified beliefs could arise by luck, which is why there has to be more to knowledge than justified true belief alone. If there is no such thing as luck, then there is no such thing as epistemic luck and we must rethink not only Gettier, but the nature of knowledge as well. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Steven D Hales.

The only just distribution is merit-based. Meritocracy thus embraces a plausible and widely-endorsed (in word, if not always in deed) egalitarian idea: equality of opportunity. But it rejects egalitarian distributive rules, as they fail to recognize merit. On the other hand, many libertarians are driven by an affection for personal responsibility. Meritocrats are too—but we argue that a society, like Nozick’s, in which the children of the wealthy have enormous advantages, and people become rich and powerful for reasons other than merit, is not a responsible one. Meritocracy takes personal responsibility more seriously than libertarianism does. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Thomas Mulligan.

The sceptical dialectic Kripke developed differed from [Wittgenstein's] both rhetorically and in detail, but its thrust was, at least as I read it, essentially the same: that we have no usable conception of what meanings are that allows for ongoing linguistic practice in accordance with them to be a fully objective matter, constituted independently of what we count as competent use but nevertheless still knowable by us.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Crispin Wright.

To start with, it’s good to be semantically aware so as not to be taken in by equivocation and other fallacies in philosophical arguments. And of course there are philosophical questions about language, such as the nature of reference or meaning, that people have made claims about by means of analyses of the semantics of particular words and constructions, such as names and propositional attitude ascriptions.There is also arguably a connection between semantics and ontology, a tantalizing possibility that doing semantics might be able to deliver insights into ontology.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Paul Elbourne.

Some would say that meta-ethics is inquiry into the metaphysics of moral properties, the semantics of moral expressions, the psychology of moral judgment, and the epistemology of the moral realm. I’d prefer to characterize meta-ethicists as trying to fit ethics and ethical inquiry into a more general account of the world and our ways of understanding it. There are many paths into meta-ethics. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Andrew Sepielli

As far as I know, the Everettian Wentaculus is the first realistic physical theory that achieves strong determinism. If strong determinism is shown to be possible and can be achieved with sufficient simplicity, we have to reconsider several issues in philosophy of science. The first issue concerns naturalness in metaphysics. An influential argument, due to David Lewis, that our definition of natural laws requires the notion of perfect naturalness, would be unsound if strong determinism is possible. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Eddy Keming Chen.

Aristotle thinks that human beings have an ultimate end or highest good, happiness ( eudamonia ). And he thinks that, to grasp happiness’s content, we should consider activities that are such as to be chosen for themselves and not for the sake of particular higher ends. Philosophical contemplation, Aristotle thinks, is the activity that most of all has this end-like character, at least when compared with other activities. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Matthew D. Walker

The laws of truth are laws which hold solely by virtue of what being true is as such. That’s what it means. That serves as a guide to a search for the laws: to get to the law-like behaviour of being true, you have to strip away a log of variables which are not part of what being true is as such. (So far, there is a parallel with the laws of mechanics: laws of motion, independent of, say, colour and shape. Frege goes through a series of abstractions (separating-outs) to get at this. One important point is this: the laws of thought govern logical forms, and primarily the phenomenon of truth-transmission (by virtue of form alone). Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Charles Travis

Democracy is definitively in trouble everywhere. This was one of the main motivations to write the book. But, things have only gotten worse since I published it. Page and Gilen’s empirical study showing that the US is technically an ‘oligarchy’ (and not a democracy) was alarming enough at the time, but the possibility that the US may no longer be a democracy in a minimal sense of peacefully transferring power based on uncontested elections is an even more worrisome development. The current global crisis of democracy stems from a variety of factors but a common thread is that citizens are losing their political power because too many “shortcuts” have been instituted that allow powerful actors to make political decisions while bypassing the citizenry. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Cristina Lafont

To give you a sense of what Zhu thought and wrote about in depth, I can start by distinguishing between the issues that are frequently discussed in the recent secondary literature and then turn to some issues that really interested him and his contemporaries but are less often discussed nowadays. There is a lot of secondary literature on Zhu’s views about the vexed relationship between qi (vital stuff, which occupies space and time) and Li (metaphysical Patterns or principles that account for or explain order, norms, and intelligibility). And there must be a small library of secondary scholarship on his understanding of the first three steps or items in the process of cultivating the self, as described in the canonical Confucian text known as the Great Learning. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Justin Tiwald

In the narrative of The Shadow of God Fichte is absolutely key. In his Lectures on the Scholar’s Vocation he picks up Kant’s idea of the Church Invisible, that humanity is engaged in a joint project of the realization of justice, and makes it into a this-worldly conception of historical immortality. What matters about human beings is not their material existence, which is finite, but the part they play in the shared project of human self-realization. Similar ideas are around elsewhere at that time, for example, in Herder, and in Saint-Just, when he says that he “despises the dust from which he’s born” but that he lives for posterity. One of the main objectives of my book is to make it clear how far this idea of “historical immortality” is part of the ether of modernity. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Rosen

it seems to me that if we want to get at “metaphysical structure” we need to say something about what kind of thing that could be and how it relates to the logic of truths, and this has to go beyond just appealing to naturalism or the continuity of philosophy with natural science. Just appealing (for example) to primitive “naturalness” or “carving at the joints” doesn’t seem to me to say much. I’m also not sure we’re trying to find out “facts about the world” or what that would mean, if it’s not what physicists or other natural scientists are supposed to be doing, rather than philosophers or logicians. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Paul Livingston

It is useful to think of the theory of rational action as saying that the rationality of an action is a function of two things: what evidence you have and what your preferences are. Thus, if you prefer excitement to boredom, and according to your evidence option A promises more excitement than any of your other options, then it is rational for you to choose A. Psychologism, Factualism and my own Experientialism are different theories of evidence, and so when you plug them into that framework they may well give different answers to what the rational action is in any given case. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Juan Comesaña.

I don’t intend to criticize any particular theory of truth. Theories of truth are attempts to establish a distinction between true and false which transcends the mere distinctions between opinions of proponents and opponents. They are attempts to entrench the idea of truth into our argumentation. The correspondence theory is one of the oldest and most successful truth theories and like all the other ones it is not self-applicable: When a proponent of the correspondence theory says that this theory is false, if it does not correspond to reality, then the principle of correspondence is still preserved. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Josef Mitterer

I like the Stag Hunt and I think it deserves more attention than Prisoner’s Dilemma, but I would not rest social contract theory on one game. A real social contract is a complex web of social norms and conventions. We can try to gain insight by isolating some classes of important social interactions, modeling them as games, and studying the games. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Brian Skyrms

Many of the alleged irreconcilable conflicts between religion and science are represented as akin to a match between a toddler and an 800-pound gorilla, with the suggestion that religion is about to be trounced once again and would be well advised to hang its head and slink away. Yet it seems to me that these conflicts invariably require supplementation by way of a piece of metaphysics that has not been adequately defended or even acknowledged. Absent the additional metaphysical thesis (which can usually be spotted doing some heavy lifting and masquerading as a bit of well-established science), it is usually possible to reconcile after all, and to do so without encroaching on the authority of genuine scientific discoveries or expertise. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Hud Hudson.

Leibniz manages to hold onto what at least he takes to be a variety of pure mechanism, while also accounting for the evident respects in which horses and fish and so on are quite different from clockworks. He does this by arguing that their structure is “mechanical to infinity”, with no possible lower limit to their decomposition, in contrast with a clock where you remove a gear or two and already you no longer have a clock at all but just a pile of pieces of metal. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Justin Erik Halldór Smith

One thing early Chinese thinkers understood well but for some reason we often struggle with in the West is that things can be and always are multiply owned, multiply constitutive. This feature can be both mine and my grandfathers—and it is mine because it is my grandfather’s. Other early traditions I work on, such as Mesoamerican Philosophy, also understood this point. I suspect that the reason this seemingly obvious and fundamental truth seems to elude us so often in the West has to do with conceptions of ownership and the rise of capitalism. The medieval West certainly understood this point well.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Alexus McLeod

Herder remains suspicious of grand philosophical systems and views them as potentially unscientific. What is of interest from the point of view of hermeneutics, though, is how he seeks to articulate a methodological, bottom-up, as he calls it, approach to understanding and insists on the need to situate the meaning of a given expression within its historical, linguistic, and cultural context. For him, this is a question that arises out of an anthropological, partly also political and cosmopolitan motivation. He offers an early discussion of prejudices, of the way in which our own cultural ideals and practices are easily ascribed an illegitimate normative status. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Kristin Gjesdal.

It’s important to remember that Zeno, the Stoic founder, writes a Republic, that looks back at Plato’s Republic . Zeno’s sense of communalism and the importance of shared humanity based on common reason, as sketched in his own Republic (only bits of which are extant) are telegraphed in remarks like these in Marcus’s Meditations: We have to work together “like feet or hands or eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth.” We are “woven together” by a “common bond,” “scarcely one thing foreign to another. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Nancy Sherman.

My view is that Locke links a moral account of personhood (rather than a moral account of personal identity) with a psychological account of personal identity. To explain why I interpret Locke this way, it is helpful to return to his kind-dependent approach to questions of identity over time. Locke’s view is that we have to spell out what we mean by ‘person’ before we can turn to questions of personal identity over time and specify the persistence conditions for persons. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ruth Boeker.

It’s not really a problem for someone to fail to be able to see the value in classical music, for instance—though we can say that they’re missing out on something, something genuinely good, if so. But there seems to be something distinctively wrong with someone who fails to be able to see what’s good about, for instance, respecting the dignity of other human beings. This sort of thing seems like it might be a demand made of everyone; there’s not obviously space for idiosyncrasy here. And if that’s right, there’s an important difference in the structure of value that tolerates idiosyncrasy as opposed to value that doesn’t, value that makes demands of everyone. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Claire Kirwin.

They were mentors—Anscombe and Foot, especially—to a lot of other women (and men). If we’re not evenly balanced yet, we’re nonetheless in a very different place from when these philosophers began their careers, and you could count on your ten fingers the number of women in philosophy in the English-speaking world. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ben Lipscomb

According to Nietzsche we interpret ourselves by self-applying the folk-psychological framework we have acquired from the society we live in. On the other hand, such frameworks are wrong. Thus, as the way in which we make sense of our mental life is based on a wrong picture of it, it does indeed turn out that our reflective awareness of it is deeply distorted. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Mattia Riccardi

Many people assume that multiculturalism is essentially an attempt to opt out of such an ethics of membership: to disavow any sense of allegiance to the larger society. But as Taylor argued in his famous essay, multiculturalism is not a disavowal of membership, but rather an avowal that there are many different ways of being a member, many different ways of belonging. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Will Kymlicka.

The sciences of wellbeing such as positive psychology and happiness economics, rose in the last thirty years on the coattails of the waning influence of traditional economics, the rise of data-driven self-help, and the enthusiasm about evidence-based policy. These trends have inevitably shaped the field, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Anna Alexandrova.

Herder is not a usual naturalist, whatever one thinks it means, nor does he call himself one, since it is a term that becomes current only in the late nineteenth century. I don’t claim to be able to say what naturalism is always and everywhere, but I identify three respects in which Herder is a naturalist – all of which, I think, characterize (more or less) positions that some philosophers who call themselves naturalists today would hold, to some degree or another. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Rachel Zuckert.

Solitude might be Nietzsche's most innovative conception in virtue theory. When I started the book, I didn't plan to write about it at all, but some of my colleagues suggested taking a look. This is where the distant-reading method paid off. I realized that, for him, solitude is a disposition that manifests in particular in the context of intra-group and inter-group relations. The person who embodies solitude is disposed to look for, point out, and ridicule the most contemptible aspects of their ingroup, especially if it's an unelective rather than elective affinity (e.g., family, nationality). Nietzsche does this all the time, for instance when he rags on the Germans while praising other nationalities and ethnicities. In a sense, it's the collective version of what he celebrates in the pathos of distance and having a sense of humor. With those two, one is able to laugh at and ridicule (aspects of) the I . With solitude, one is able to laugh at and ridicule aspects of the we . Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Mark Alfano.

Science is not just a useful device for making predictions, but rather aims to describe and explain the world, and it often succeeds. Evidence that science does succeed sometimes in achieving truth include the many successful technological applications of science, for example the role of electrons in modern machines. Other signs of truth accomplishment include the wide consensus that operates in many advanced areas of science, and the effective role of experiment in sometimes overturning established theories. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Paul Thagard

We claim that a goodly segment of the public is offended and harmed by today’s public sculpture. We think these harms are akin in structure, though perhaps not in degree, to the harms said to be caused by the public display of pornography. Merely seeing pornographic depictions of events offends many people; likewise, a good deal of today’s public sculpture offends the public eye—witness the letters, petitions, litigation and vandalism directed against this art in public. The public display of pornography is also claimed to have a negative effect on some people when they reflect upon it. If one is a woman, one is humiliated by the depiction of women as simply objects of lust. Analogously, viewing public sculpture and finding it ugly or silly or simply commonplace, the average person’s eye and mind are brought into conflict with the judgement of the aesthetic and political authorities. The citizen is likely to feel either aesthetically incompetent or the butt of a joke played at his or her expense.' Richard Marshall interviews Douglas Stalker

Homeopathic medicines are prepared by successively diluting the supposed active substance in a water and alcohol solution, and their claim is that the more dilute a medicine, the more potent, even if it the dilution passes the Avogardo point for molar solutions so that there is in all probability, or in fact, not even one molecule of the active substance left. According to homeopathy, nothing does something; according to chemistry, nothing does nothing. You can’t have your chemistry and homeopathy, too. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Douglas Stalker.

The transformation of Smith into a libertarian ideologue is a real travesty. One can certainly use Smith to oppose protectionism — whether in the form of tariffs or in the form of government support for particular industries – but not to oppose government support for the poor. To be sure, he does consider it a disaster for governments to micro-manage markets, and believes that broadly free markets will do more than anything else to raise the standard of living of the poor. But he consistently says that the main thing to watch out for are laws that favor “masters” over their workers, not the other way around, he never opposed the English Poor Law, and he advocated for some policies – a system of public education, especially – that would have vastly expanded what the government did on behalf of the poor.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Sam Fleischacker.

My basic take, which I'll get into below, is that in the 1780s, Kant thought that rational beings should wish to be without their inclinations, whereas in the 1790s, Kant changed his mind, and concluded that the inclinations were good in themselves. And that the reason he did this had to do with theodicy. But if you're suspicious of talk of Gods and evil, then what's at stake for you in this debate? Cntinuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert Gressis

If we were out on a fishing boat and you didn't want to put on your life jacket because you felt that "God would provide" that is your choice. But if there was a storm coming up and you wanted to break the radio because "we can count on God to rescue us" then you've put me at risk too. To me, an awful lot of science denial seems like the latter. If someone believes in Flat Earth, I guess they're not really hurting anyone but themselves (although they are contributing to a denialist culture, which does hurt others). But what about disbelief in climate change or the Covid-19 vaccine? There I think I am justified in being intolerant because someone's irrational and false beliefs are putting the rest of us at risk. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Lee McIntyre

In metaphysics, there are various disputes that come down to a choice between rival theories. These rival theories have different ideologies that, presumably, are different with respect to how well they correspond to the world’s structure. So, we should base our choice at least in part on which theory we think is most likely to have the most accurate ideology. How do we determine which that is? I favor a virtue-driven methodology. Once a dispute reaches a mature state of stability -- in the sense that the main theoretical options are coherent, their consequences have been identified, and so on -- we can compare the rival theories with respect to various theoretical virtues, features of the theory that make it more likely to be correct. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Peter Finocchiaro.

The notion of metaphysical emergence isn’t specifically tied to physics. To be sure, the notion of metaphysical emergence is initially inspired by attention to special science entities, which appear to cotemporally (i.e., synchronically but not necessarily instantaneously) depend on (typically massively complex) combinations of physical goings-on, but which also appear to be to some extent ontologically and causally autonomous—that is, to be distinct from, and distinctively efficacious as compared to, lower-level physical goings-on. But the general notion of metaphysical emergence as coupling dependence and autonomy—as between, e.g., mental states and brain (and ultimately fundamental physical) states—could in-principle apply to other purported dependence bases. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jessica Wilson

The short answer is that cancer is a very complex disease; we should not expect a science that investigates this complex disease to come up with a simple, unified theory or model that explains all there is to explain. Cancer is massively heterogeneous - both in its causes and dynamics, as well as in responses to therapy, progression, etc. This is illuminated by the fact that when I tell cancer scientists that I wrote a book on cancer, they typically ask me which kind of cancer (e.g., breast, bone, lung, etc.). No cancer scientist thinks that one should (or could) write a single book on cancer (in general). Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Anya Plutynski

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

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 .

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

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

About masculinist bias in epistemology: I’m a skeptic about this, at least about the specific allegations that have been made by some feminist epistemologists, namely that the individualism and abstractness of Western (or “Western”) philosophy is evidence of masculinist bias. First of all, men have dominated philosophy and religious thought throughout the world and throughout history, whether we’re talking dualism, monism, Taoist, or Hindu. So every epistemological tradition has been shaped, if any has, by the interests and self-conceptions of men. Secondly, there’s variation within the “Western” epistemological tradition, and that variation cannot be explained by gender differences. Wittgenstein seems perfectly OK by the lights of some feminists who criticize the Anglo-American (which is really German-Austrian-(and-only-after-the-Nazis-) Anglo-American, having been more or less started by the Vienna Circle). Marx and Foucault are revered. So if those men can transcend their masculinity and produce theories (or anti-theories, in the case of Wittgenstein), I don’t see why Descartes couldn’t as well. Thirdly – and we know this largely because of the groundbreaking work of my colleague, Eileen O’Neill – women philosophers had a large influence on the development of Englightenment philosophy... Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interview Louise Antony

Now immediate realism is the view that in my thinking there is an immediate presence of the real to me. Reality is not mediated by a complex cognitive process which represents the world; rather that cognitive process simply brings the world into view. The intellect is not a mirror on this account; it is a capacity for conceptual operations brought into play by the world. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Gaven Kerr.

Political liberalism offers a different, more inclusive, picture of liberal politics. On this view, liberal rights and institutions are not instruments to promote a particular way of life—they are rather meant to provide a fair framework within which each person can develop and pursue their own plan of life. You don’t need to hold a liberal view about how one ought to live to endorse this picture of politics—it’s meant to be a picture of our political life that can be freely endorsed by people with a wide variety of different doctrines.'On the more modest view that I prefer, pluralism is not an external constraint on liberalism, it’s rather a fact about liberal societies in particular. It’s a fact that in societies where basic rights and liberties are protected, there will always be the kind of reasonable disagreement that I described in one of my previous answers. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jonathan Quong

I think of Spinoza as a radical religious reformer. I think he was trying to say this: “There is a single entity whose nature determines the structure and existence of the universe, and that entity is the thing that people have been calling “God” for many centuries. But they got the metaphysics (or theology) very wrong, and now we’re in a position to figure out what this divine thing really is, and to see how the writers of scriptures managed to get the basic moral of the story right, while getting all the metaphysical stuff wrong. And by the way, if you understand what I’m saying, you’ll see that there’s no harm in allowing philosophers to write about such things.” Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Charlie Huenemann.

Leibniz reports how, when still a schoolboy of 15 about to go up to university, he was “seduced by the ease with which everything could be understood” through the mechanical philosophy of Descartes and Gassendi, and “gave himself over to the moderns”. But he was well-versed in the Scholastics, and thought they still had much to offer on the problem of individuation (what makes a thing the individual it is), the problem of the composition of the continuum, and the problem of evil (why there is evil in the world if it was created by an omniscient, omnipotent, free and omnibenevolent deity)—three problems that remained central concerns for him throughout his career.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Richard T.W. Arthur.

There is a sense in which Kant’s characterization of his thought as a “Copernican revolution” has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because of Kant’s emphasis on the novelty of his project, Kant scholars (particularly in the Anglo-American context) have concluded that reading Kant’s predecessors and contemporaries could only be wasted effort, since after all whatever they might say Kant is saying something else. This has contributed to a general neglect of the German context, in which a number of key Kantian doctrines (like the spontaneity of the understanding, or the autonomy of the will, to name only two) are pre-figured which, in turn, makes Kant’s views on those and other topics seem utterly new. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Corey W Dyck

The disputed issue of what kind of intentional introduction children ought to have to religion, if any, centres around two questions. The first concerns how the responsibilities and permissions to make and provide for the introductions are to be distributed; the second concerns the manner, aims, and content of the introductions to be made and provided for. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews John Tillson.

Bolzano’s dates are 1781-1848. Thus his life includes the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the conservative reaction (in the Habsburg lands, the “pre-march” time or Vormärz). Most of his writings date from the years 1810—1848. A great many histories of philosophy call this period the Age of German (Post-Kantian) Idealism; and certainly many philosophical works of that time fit that description. Bolzano’s don’t, though, and this is perhaps one reason why he has not received much attention in general histories of philosophy (there are noteworthy exceptions, however: for example, the third volume of Anders Wedberg’s A History of Philosophy bears the subtitle: from Bolzano to Wittgenstein.). A second reason for neglect is that some of his best and most influential work was in the foundations of mathematics. According to Bolzano, and I think he was right about this, such foundational work belongs to both mathematics and philosophy. Generally, though, while work on the foundations of arithmetic (e.g. Frege’s) is often recognized as philosophical, work on, e.g., the foundations of geometry or the calculus is considered to belong to mathematics but not to philosophy (again, there are exceptions: Abraham Robinson and John Lane Bell come to mind here). A third factor was political: Bolzano fell into disfavour with the authorities in Vienna and was comprehensively persecuted: removed from his professorship at the Charles University in Prague. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Paul Rusnock

When you start looking closely at the conditions which made possible the emergence of early analytic philosophy in Cambridge in the late 1890s, you find great variety and a host of influences at work—from engagement with the great dead philosophers, other philosophical schools in England, Scotland and further afield from the continent, and other disciplines as well, including mathematics, the natural sciences and classics. Early analytic philosophy was an interdisciplinary and Pan-European achievement. I think that Russell and Moore’s intellectual stature didn’t consist solely in their intrinsic brilliance, although they had that too, but in their capacity to channel these forces even for a while. And we can say something similar about the Polish School and the Vienna Circle which succeeded Moore and Russell at the forefront of developments in analytic philosophy. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Fraser MacBride

Jewish philosophy should give way to the philosophy (or philosophies) of Judaism, a deep analysis that takes normative Judaism as the explanandum—and I believe that this project will be most amenable to analytic philosophical concerns. In my view, two estimable figures in this (medieval) way of understanding and doing Jewish philosophy are Julius Guttmann and Leon Roth. There has also recently come into being the Association for the Philosophy of Judaism, which is devoted to injecting the subject with analytic rigor. I am always on the alert for parochialism and exceptionalism in Jewish philosophy. I am no fan of any kind of apologetics, so it doesn’t worry me that there is no analogue to Alvin Plantinga in Jewish philosophy. Further, I think philosophers working out of the Jewish tradition tend to focus on commentary, rather than apologetics. Even medieval Jewish kalam is a commentarial tradition. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Daniel Frank.

Metaethics is commonly treated as a subfield of philosophical ethics, but metaethical questions are largely theoretical rather than moral or practical. They are questions such as: Are there ethical properties, and if so what are they like (metaphysics)? How do we acquire ethical knowledge and justify ethical beliefs (epistemology)? What is the best theory of the meaning of terms like ‘good’ and ‘ought’ (philosophy of language)? And what is the nature of moral judgment and how does it motivate action (philosophy of mind/psychology)? Any full metaethical theory has to answer all of these questions and many subsidiary questions. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Matthew Chrisman

The post 1492 world of Empires that came to encompass almost all the world, with Great Britain incorporating almost twenty-five percent of it, transformed the globe. Most of the great liberation writers including Du Bois, Fanon, Memmi, Cabral, Nkrumah, Freire engaged with the western thinkers, exposing the hypocrisy of their espousal of universal high ideals, which were exclusive to those who had a attained a certain level of civilization, western white males. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews David Boucher

I worry that too much focus on the technical can draw attention away from the social, ethical, and political dimensions of environmental decision-making in a complex, diverse, and globalized world. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Marion Hourdequin

Positivism and nonpositivism differ on the role of moral considerations in determining the content of the law in force. All sensible views treat matters of brute social/political fact as partly determining law’s content but some, the nonpositivists, have it that moral judgment is inevitably required in interpreting legal materials to figure out what the law says. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Liam Murphy.

I’m keenly aware of the possibility of the Parmenidean (e.g., me!) undermining their own position. After all, explanation itself seems to be relational; things are explained (often at any rate) in terms of other things. I don’t shy away from this apparent or even real self-undermining. For me, it’s a feature not a bug. And I embrace this self-undermining, in much the same way that Parmenides may have (see especially Owen’s reading of Parmenides), as Wittgenstein does at the end of the Tractatus, as Bradley does, and as my skeptical hero, Sextus Empiricus, does. In this way, I offer—paradoxically perhaps—a relational metaphysical challenge to relational metaphysics itself. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Della Rocca

Some, particularly those influenced by Foucault in the world of disability studies, go further and suggest that eugenics itself created and structured our concept of normalcy during the late nineteenth century... I think this further view is implausible and try to make a case for an account of the relationship between eugenics and normalcy that blends together social and psychological factors more than is usually done in the literature.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert A. Wilson

While some distance from or even outright scepticism about self-determination is typical in current moral theory, there is no comparable distance from reason. Modern ethics tends on the whole to avoid overt commitment to free will. But it is riddled with metaphysically unexplained claims about reasons and our responsiveness to them – about, in other words, reasons as exercising a power to move. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Thomas Pink

You cannot work on the philosophy of biology or physics without detailed knowledge of those sciences. A philosophy of the special sciences approach to perception also requires detailed knowledge of the relevant psychology. The thing is, though, psychology is an indeterministic science, and many self-proclaimed naturalists in the philosophy of mind are statistical illiterates. Without an understanding of the relevant statistical evidence, confirmation bias is a real risk Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Mark Calderon.

Idealization is about simplifying things whereas approximation is about distance from the actual truth in modal space (that does not necessarily involve simplification). Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Shaffer.

In my view, life is a process. It is still common, both in the philosophy of biology and in general metaphysics, to take an organism to be a kind of thing, or substance. But this is problematic for several reasons. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews John Dupré

In a nutshell, the late Cambridge pragmatist invites you to do two things. First, when presented with some apparently problematic concept (such as ‘wrongness’), don’t rush to ask what the concept stands for, or represents. Ask instead what function, or role, that concept plays in human thought. Second, when presented with some apparently problematic philosophical claim (such as ‘Wrongness exists’), don’t rush to treat it as an ‘external’ claim about the relationship between the problematic discourse and the world. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Hallvard Lillehammer.

The only way I know of getting at mathematical metaphysics and epistemology is to start with mathematical method. Mathematics is designed to enable us to reason efficiently and effectively, and that has a strong influence on the kinds of objects we talk about and the way we talk about them. I can't see how to make sense of the nature of mathematical objects without understanding their role in mathematical thought. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jeremy Avigad

Jerry Fodor has aptly said that the availability of the computer metaphor represents “the only respect in which contemporary Cognitive Science represents a major advance” over the representational theories of mind upheld by its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors. I’d like to think that if Fodor had known Dharmakīrti’s philosophy, he might just as well have said that the availability of the computer metaphor represents the only really significant difference between his program and that of the 7th-century Buddhist Dharmakīrti. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Dan Arnold.

The Oxford Realists thought that knowing is a mental state and, because of that, that each of us is especially well placed to tell whether or not we know something. Their view made it difficult to see how other people can be in a position to correct someone’s sincere view that they know something...Austin thinks of knowing something as akin to possessing proof. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Guy Longworth.

What they were reacting to, in my view, was a familiar ‘odour’ in some of Heidegger’s rhetoric. And, the person to blame here is not Adorno, or Habermas, or anyone else who is offended by the stench of that rhetoric. The culprit is Heidegger. Heidegger is responsible for all of this confusion. He’s not a saint, or some misunderstood martyr. He wilfully tried to find a way to link some of the most extraordinary philosophical insights of the twentieth century to the rhetoric of National Socialism for a period of time. He wove that rhetoric into the tapestry of his thought, and he blemished it in the process. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Mahon O'Brien.

Disability, even if neutral, invariably requires accommodation, and accommodation is, in the world we inhabit, a scarce resource. Disability often involves caretaking work undertaken by others - what Eva Kittay calls the labor of dependence - and again in the world we inhabit this is work that disproportionality falls on women, especially women of color, and is poorly compensated. Disability often involves complex health conditions, and there is striking socioeconomic disparity in whether parents can manage the cost and even in some cases just the time such health conditions can demand. All that to say, it’s complicated, and I’ve grown wary of answering questions like this at a highly abstracted level. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Elizabeth Barnes

The problem with conceptions of justice forming the basis for organizing social institutions resembles the problems Rawlsians envision for basing society on conceptions of the good. Reasonable people disagree about which conception of the good is correct, and so imposing it on those who disagree will be a source of instability, and, in my view, distrust between those in power and those out of power. But if reasonable people can disagree about justice as deeply as they disagree about the good, then the same problems applies conceptions of justice. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Kevin Vallier.

'I agree with much in Susan Wolf’s characterization (although in one early work she unfortunately used the “autonomy” label for leeway-liberty, with Sartre and other existentialists in mind too). She saw value in Frankfurt’s idea that autonomy is connected with shaping our own motive repertoire, including our cares. I have gone a little further and suggested that existential autonomy is the freedom-condition of responsibility for character, self, or practical identity, just as some kind of rational control (perhaps with leeway) is the freedom condition for morally responsible action in general. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews John Davenport.

I think metaphysics is what it’s always been - and it’s hard to say what that is! I think it’s in a pretty good state: we’ve emerged from the darkness of logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy, and conceptual analysis, and are once again unapologetically trying to say something about reality! Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ross P Cameron.

That the book is called Analytic Islamic Philosophy is a political statement. I am re-appropriating, and owning, the slur that it is to be called an ‘analytic’ so-and so. I have found scholarship in Islamic philosophy to have hitherto been overly geared towards philology and textual exegesis. The gatekeepers to that sub-discipline have made it the case that one has to get into, and show the credentials of being capable of grasping, the minutiae of issues concerning translations, for example, in order to be allowed to have a voice. I think this is partly responsible then for the exclusion of Islamic philosophy from the curriculum in modern UK and US philosophy departments – philosophers, qua philosophers, are deemed not to be allowed to say anything about it. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Anthony Booth

Philosophy is not an empirical subject and does not address empirical questions (or at least, when it does, it makes a mistake). It also is not a purely formal subject, in that it does not involve exclusively and explicitly rule-governed reasoning from a set of axioms to some number of derived statements or theorems. Intuitions, speculations, common sense, and ordinary language play a significant role and rightly so. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Daniel A. Kaufman

'What I “corrected” was just the impoverished conception of Hobbesian humans’ psychology, and the corresponding picture of Hobbes’s central analysis of social disorder, and Hobbes’s proposed remedy for it, which I argued demanded engagement with the content of people’s socially disruptive transcendent interests. In short, I pulled out the narrow egoism peg supporting the traditional structure of Hobbes interpretation and watched the whole thing collapse into dust.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Sharon Lloyd

Innocent Cartesianism is an extract or residue from unreconstructed Cartesianism that is defensible in terms provided by analytic philosophy as we have it today. An important strand of it can be put by saying that while natural science is capable of objective truth in its domain, it’s not a theory of everything. There are more forms of systematic and correct understanding than are provided by natural science. Brain science doesn’t tell us everything about the mind; Darwinism doesn’t tell us everything about the place of human beings in nature or their motivation; there are further authoritative forms of understanding, including mathematics, philosophy, and ethics.Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Tom Sorell.

Phenomenology takes root in historical situations of peril where the philosophical spirit is most under attack. As a philosophy committed to making sense of meaning, it uniquely is suited to address moments of crisis when that meaning is put in question. If one of philosophy’s aims is to make rational sense of the human condition, then after the World Wars many in Europe were convinced that life is absurd. Why then, so some thought, bother with philosophy which is running a fool’s errand, looking for sense where no sense is to be made? It is within this bleak context immediately before the Second War—that one finds Husserl struggling to articulate his vision of a philosophy capable of responding to what he himself characterizes as a crisis of reason, or meaning. Heidegger later does something similar when criticizing the pernicious aspects of modern technology. And Michel Henry follows suit when his phenomenology of life objects to what he terms the barbarism of contemporary mass society. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Steven DeLay

Climate change threatens to lead to climate colonialism in three ways. First: the imperative to respond is a colonialist imposition in and of itself in Nkrumah’s sense, given that the challenges posed by rising temperatures are disproportionately caused by the emissions of colonizer nations like the US and its effects will constrain or control the governing possibilities of the Global South (or Third World or whatever we’re saying these days). Secondly, the likely consequences will reverse whatever gains have been made since independence and cement colonial hierarchies of power: many Global South nations are positioned to be hurt first and worst by climate impacts and have worse infrastructure to prepare effective responses to climate crises. Lastly, the character of global climate justice efforts might themselves feed into climate colonialism. Powerful countries, corporations, and non-state actors may exploit the less powerful to secure their own resources and populations. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Olufemi Taiwo

'The standard view of rights is based on the sensible thought that rights correspond to duties. There are two paradigmatic sorts of duties, and thus two paradigmatic sorts of rights. The duties are the duty not to harm and the duty to take care of one’s special commitments, commitments inside special relationships, such as promisor to promisee, or parent to child.' 'Thomson did a great job articulating the standard model of rights, and she set the terms of the debate. My job has been largely to show that the debate has reached a kind of dead end, and that we need to go back and rethink the standard model that she articulated so well. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Alec Walen.

van Inwagen thinks we can bypass these issues because the real threat to our free will is not causal determination (our acts having deterministic causes) but simply determination (our acts being necessitated by past events and the natural laws), since this is enough to guarantee that we cannot ever do otherwise. I think this is wrong, in that the problem only arises given that we don’t have any causal control over the (remote) past... ...I think that the connection between causation and free will has been way underappreciated. How our acts are brought about, or the causal history of our acts, is clearly relevant to our freedom. Think about severe forms of coercion, manipulation, brainwashing, or compulsion... Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Carolina Sartorio.

'Can God make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it? If you say yes, there’s something God can’t do: he can’t lift the stone. If you say no, there’s something God can’t do: he can’t make the stone. So either way, there’s something God can’t do. Although Anselm doesn’t consider the paradox of the stone (as it’s called) specifically, he does have an answer. That God is omnipotent doesn’t mean that any sentence that starts out “God can” comes out true.' 'In addition to the paradox of the stone, there is the lesser-known paradox of the burrito, from The Simpsons: can Jesus Christ microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cannot eat it? My philosophy of religion students usually see quite quickly that there’s no real paradox here: according to orthodox Christology, Jesus is fully human, so of course the answer is yes.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Thomas Williams.

I think it’s wrong to assimilate Climacus’ own philosophical activity to the Hegelian manner of doing philosophy that is on the receiving end of many of his jokes. What Climacus does, rather, is to discuss (and enact) an alternative manner of doing philosophy, one which he associates closely with Socrates and which he thinks can be practiced without interfering with an individual’s ability to live an ethical or religious life. He characterizes this Socratic conception of philosophy as ‘that simpler philosophy, which is delivered by an existing individual for existing individuals. Contininuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Paul Muench.

What beliefs should we accept? How can it be reasonable that scientists use models and idealizations they know not to be true? And how do these questions bear on the epistemology of science and art? Catherine Z. Elgin, Professor of Philosophy of Education at Harvard University, started to investigate these far-reaching issues in a cooperation with Nelson Goodman more than thirty years ago. Since then she has developed an inventive and radical philosophical approach, which goes right to the core of epistemology. The historian of science Ariane Tanner interviews Catherine Z. Elgin.

I think there is a huge gap between the animals in Chinese people’s imagination and the animals in real life. In the zodiac portrayal, the 12 animals are living beings with feelings, personalities, intelligence and wisdom, but in the real life, the Chinese people have little positive things to say about the zodiac animals such as pigs, hens/roosters, mice/rats, monkeys, snakes and dogs, and most view them with distain and treat them as lifeless things. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Deborah Cao.

Aristotle opens his great Metaphysics with the observation that ‘all humans by nature desire to know.’ Although easy sounding, this claim is in fact complex and contentious: it implicates Aristotle in a series of controversial claims, including not least that human beings have a nature, which nature he will later identify as their essence, with a concomitant commitment, then, to essentialism about species. What is more, Aristotle here implies that the essences human beings have are of a highly distinctive character: to be human is to seek to know. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Christopher Shields.

The conceptual question whether trans-women count as women is another matter. (So too, the ‘metaphysical’ question, if there is such a thing, whether trans-women are women.) On this issue, I hew to Simone de Beauvoir’s view that our concept ‘woman’ includes an important path-dependent element, and I think that most trans-women lack the life histories that constitute woman-hood. But there is room for argument about that. ‘Woman’ is a cluster concept, and anyway it is not as if ‘man’ or ‘woman’ have sharp boundaries. There is also room for argument about whether, if Beauvoir is right, we ought to revise or abandon the concept ‘woman’. This is really a question of whether we should ditch our gender concepts altogether. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Les Green

I think all of these ‘big three’ axes of oppression—race, class, and sex—work in pretty much the same way when it comes to privilege. There are interesting differences between the three categories, because sex has a biological basis and is almost always immediately visible, while that’s less true for race and there’s the whole issue of people from one group ‘passing’ as members of another, and then with class there’s no biological basis at all but there are nonetheless certain markers that show up in appearance that can be the basis of certain sorts of treatment, but there’s social mobility through the class ranks in a way that really isn’t true for race and usually isn’t true for sex (although is becoming a little more true with the increasing number of female people transitioning to live as men). Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Holly Lawford-Smith.

A mental process is embodied if it is composed, in part, of processes that occur not in the brain but in the wider (that is, non-neural) body. A mental process is extended if it is composed, partly, of processes whereby a cognizing creature exploits, manipulates, or transforms relevant structures in its environment in order to accomplish a cognitive task. What makes a structure relevant is that carries information relevant to the accomplishing of the task in question, and by acting on it the cognizing creature is able to appropriate this information.A mental process is embedded or scaffolded in the wider environment if this environment plays an important (perhaps essential) role in facilitating this process’s fulfillment of its defining function (that is, if the process relies on the environment in order to work properly).A mental process is enacted if it is made up of a process of “enaction” – interaction, of the right sort, with the environment. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Mark Rowlands

When my daughter was fifteen months old, I took her to a pumpkin patch, and she was so excited, she started uttering—screaming, really—her first sentence while pointing all around: “Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!” Experimental philosophy presentations have much the same feel. They offer a pumpkin patch full of philosophically rich ideas just waiting to be explored. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Chris Weigel