Articles #philosophy of religion

Terence Cuneo: If moral facts don’t exist, then neither do epistemic ones. (I assume here that these facts are as realists understand them.) The argument’s next premise is that epistemic facts exist. Some beliefs and practices of inquiry are irrational, or justified, or supported by epistemic reasons. The argument for this claim is that, when we consider the price tag for going antirealist about the epistemic domain—by, say, denying that any beliefs could be irrational or justified—we see that it’s very high.'

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

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.

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

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.