Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

Why people disagree

4. November 2019 Philosophy News News
People disagree. Human beings often express conflicting views about a variety of different issues, from food and music to science and politics. With the development of advanced communication technologies, this fact has become more visible than ever. (Think of Twitter wars.) The extent and depth of our disagreements can lead many to despair of making […] The post Why people disagree appeared first on OUPblog.         Related StoriesOur souls make us who we areHow birth shapes human existenceHidden colour in Greek and Roman sculpture [More]
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A Lesson of the Global History of Philosophy: Humility

4. November 2019 Philosophy News News
“There’s something profoundly and instructively humbling in the realization that contemporary thought is not as far advanced as we are often inclined to suppose.” Those are the words of Dan Arnold, associate professor of philosophy of religions at the University of Chicago, in a recent interview at Richard Marshall’s 3:16AM. He continues: Part of what I want my readers to appreciate is the extent to which some first-millennium debates among Indian philosophers—debates between Buddhists and their Hindu critics, for example, about the ontological status of universals—represent not just quaint and historically interesting moments in the history of thought, but debates that centrally concern issues still very much at issue among contemporary philosophers. This should serve as a corrective to some regrettably but widely skewed preconceptions about what philosophy is, showing that pre-modern Indian thinkers are every bit as deserving of a place in the history of philosophy as their Western counterparts. But there is also, I think, something just quintessentially philosophical in the humbling realization that what some Indian philosophers wrote around 500 c.e.might just as effectively characterize the state of a philosophical problem as anything by, say, Daniel Dennett or Jerry Fodor. The interview serves as an informative guide to the thought of Dharmakīrti, a seventh century Indian philosopher, in whose work Arnold often finds anticipations of, and [More]
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Glanzberg from Northwestern to Rutgers

4. November 2019 Philosophy News News
Michael Glanzberg, currently professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, will be taking up a senior position in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Professor Glanzberg works in philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of psychology, and related areas. You can learn more about his research here. He starts his new position at Rutgers in January, 2020. (via Dean Zimmerman) The post Glanzberg from Northwestern to Rutgers appeared first on Daily [More]
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Completing your verbs—infinitive and gerunds

3. November 2019 Philosophy News News
Most of us have been told at some point that a sentence has a subject and predicate and that the predicate consists of a verb and an object—the girl kicked the ball. We may have been introduced to distinctions such as transitive, intransitive, and linking verbs (like carry, snore, and become, respectively). But there is much more to the intricacies of what must follow a verb. The post Completing your verbs—infinitive and gerunds appeared first on [More]
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What We Know Now: Humanities for All One Year Later

1. November 2019 Philosophy News News
by Daniel Fisher, Humanities for All Project Director Last summer, the National Humanities Alliance launched the Humanities for All website to help foster publicly engaged humanities scholarship in U.S. higher education. Showcasing the contribution that this work makes to both academic and public life, the website brings together over 1,500 examples of publicly engaged research, [More]
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APA Member Interview: Beth Barker

1. November 2019 Philosophy News News
Beth Barker is a philosopher in transition from the University of Missouri’s PhD program in philosophy, where she completed her MA, to Northwestern University’s. Her interests in philosophy are social epistemology and social philosophy of language. In particular, she likes thinking about spaces of epistemic exchange besides testimony, and the nuanced ways knowers might wrong [More]
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The Technique of Thought: Nancy, Laruelle, Malabou, and Stiegler after Naturalism

1. November 2019 Philosophy News News
2019.10.17 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Ian James, The Technique of Thought: Nancy, Laruelle, Malabou, and Stiegler after Naturalism, University of Minnesota Press, 2019, 247pp., $28.00 (pbk), ISBN 9781517904302. Reviewed by Samuel Talcott, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia This book tentatively envisions philosophy as a technique of thought in order to "imagine a future" when there is no longer a fracture between analytic and Continental traditions in philosophy. If particular philosophies differ in their methods of thinking, then these might be considered, compared, and debated, no matter how incompatible the philosophical traditions appear. The focus on technique requires for Ian James, moreover, the recognition that all thought be understood in relation to the reality to which it responds. And this means that philosophy must be a naturalism pursued in relation to scientific work. James borrows the image of thought as technique from Bernard Stiegler, a contemporary French philosopher, and the hopeful vision of communication restored from Richard Rorty. The book proceeds... Read [More]
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