Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

Russell’s Moral Philosophy

4. May 2021 Philosophy News News
[Revised entry by Charles Pigden on May 4, 2021. Changes to: Bibliography] Russell remains famous as a logician, a metaphysician, and as a philosopher of mathematics, but in his own day he was also notorious for his social and political opinions. He wrote an immense amount about practical ethics - women's rights, marriage and morals, war and peace, and the vexed question of whether socialists should smoke good cigars. (They should.) And unlike present-day practical ethicists (with a few notable exceptions such as Peter Singer) he was widely read by the non-philosophical public. (See for instance Phillips [More]
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Lyricism as activism: Sigurd Olson and The Singing Wilderness

4. May 2021 Philosophy News News
Placing the reader in the poetic and ethical space is the first step toward direct action that affects the larger human community: a step toward activism. Activism formalizes the values that inspire and ultimately direct our will—and action—to preserve and protect. By opening new worlds, other spaces, and creating experiences for the reader—and, crucially, letting the reader explore those worlds for herself or for himself—the lyric writer has an opportunity to create a protected zone for significant communication. The post Lyricism as activism: Sigurd Olson and <em>The Singing Wilderness</em> appeared first on OUPblog.        Related StoriesWas Spinoza a populist? [Long read]Fake news is not new: Russia’s 19th-century disinformation experimentPutting my mouth where my money is: the origin of [More]
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Thinking and Being

2. May 2021 Philosophy News News
2021.05.01 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Irad Kimhi, Thinking and Being, Harvard University Press, 2018, 166pp., $42.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780674967892. Reviewed by Jean-Philippe Narboux, Université Bordeaux Montaigne 1. Irad Kimhi's book is in my view one of the most important books in philosophy to have appeared of late. To set it in its proper context, it may help to begin with the following excerpt from a course by Wittgenstein: Thinking, wishing, hoping, believing, and negation all have something in common. The same sort of puzzling questions can be asked about each. How can one wish for a thing that does not happen or hope that something will happen that does not? How can not-p negate p, when p may not be the case, i.e. when nothing corresponds to p? (Wittgenstein 1979: 110-111) Whatever their maieutic... Read [More]
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