Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

PhD scholarship on the Ethics of Carbon Pricing

20. April 2021 Philosophy News News
Job List:  Europe Name of institution:  Dublin City University Town:  Dublin Country:  Ireland Job Description:  The Institute of Ethics at Dublin City University is offering a four year fully funded (stipends & fees) scholarship in the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at Dublin City University. The project will be supervised by Professor Bert Gordijn and Dr. Goran [More]
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James Beattie Scholarship -- Project: The Problem of Epistemic value

19. April 2021 Philosophy News News
Job List:  Europe Name of institution:  Department of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen Town:  Aberdeen Country:  United Kingdom Job Description:  This PhD fee waiver is available only for overseas students, full-time and resident, with a start date of September 2021. This scholarship will cover the difference between home fees and overseas fees. The home fees for 2021/22 are £4,500 and overseas fees are £17,000. Thus, the value of the fee waiver will be £12,500. The successful candidate will be liable for the home portion of fees, £4,500, which will be fixed for the duration of their programme, as well as receive a stipend of £6,000 per academic [More]
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Get Parfit's Ethics Free (till May 3)

19. April 2021 Philosophy News News
Cambridge University Press is offering free PDF downloads of Parfit's Ethics until May 3. (After that, you can always access the pre-print from PhilPapers, which has the same essential content but differs wildly in pagination and doesn't reflect subsequent copyediting.)At just 55 pages of main text, it's the most concise introduction you'll find to Parfit's wide-ranging ethical thought. Perfect for grad seminars, or anyone interested in highlights from the greatest moral philosopher of the past century (or, indeed, ever).There's a lot of content packed into those few pages:1. Introduction2. Rationality and Objectivity - A simple summary of Parfit's arguments against Rational Egoism and Normative Subjectivism.  Briefly evaluates the arguments against Parfit's non-naturalist normative realism.3. Distributive Justice - Explains Parfit's priority view, and suggests a way to improve upon it (that basic goods or welfare contributors, rather than welfare itself, might have diminishing marginal value).  Explains away the arguments of anti-aggregationists.  Summarizes Parfit's views on "moral mathematics" and collective harm.4. Character and Consequence - Explains "rational irrationality", and extends it to critique Parfit's understanding of "blameless wrongdoing" (or virtuously-acquired viciousness). Defends self-effacing moral theories.  Assesses Parfit's argument that common-sense morality is directly self-defeating.5. The Triple [More]
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The UK/British Variant

19. April 2021 Philosophy News News
As the virus behind COVID remains active in large populations, it mutates and produces new strains. This is one reason why continuing to follow safe practices until herd immunity is reached is so important. If the “freedom” to serve as mutant incubators persist widely and long enough, the current vaccines will be reduced in effectiveness [More]
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Politics and Negation: For an Affirmative Philosophy

18. April 2021 Philosophy News News
2021.04.03 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Roberto Esposito, Politics and Negation: For an Affirmative Philosophy, Zakiya Hanafi (tr.), Polity, 2019, 237pp., $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781509536627. Reviewed by Gregory Fried, Boston College Who would have dared contradict Johnny Mercer, who sang that You've got to accentuate the positive Eliminate the negative Latch on to the affirmative Don't mess with Mr. In-Between No, don't mess with Mr. In-Between Well, Roberto Esposito has dared to contradict this seemingly prudent advice. In the book, translated fluently from the Italian by Zakiya Hanafi, Esposito argues that the "mess" that the western tradition now finds itself in, both philosophically and politically, is one brought on by a mistaken relation to the negative, most especially by the conception that, in Mercer's words, "You've got to . . . eliminate the negative." Esposito contends that we must learn "the ways of understanding and practicing the 'affirmativity' of... Read [More]
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Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction

17. April 2021 Philosophy News News
2021.04.02 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Gregory Currie, Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction, Oxford University Press, 2020, 240pp., $70.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199656615. Reviewed by Peter Lamarque, University of York, UK Few would dispute that, all things considered, some exposure to works of imaginative literature (novels, plays, poems) as part of a rounded education is better than no such exposure. Beyond that, disagreements are rife. Culture wars loom, with anxieties over curriculum choice, gender and racial bias, elitism, contested pedagogic methods, and a disconcerting vagueness about aims sought. In this important and polemical book, Gregory Currie sidesteps direct engagement with these heated controversies at the frontline of educational policy but nevertheless shines a penetrating, for some disturbing, light on one of the most prominent lines of defence for a humanistic, literary education, the thought that we can learn from works of fiction in substantial ways: that reading fiction can make us better... Read [More]
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