3:AM Magazine

Philosophical debate should be open to anyone, but one can only take part in such a debate if one recognises, as every rational person should, that there is such a thing as a philosophical debate, which differs in important ways from purely factual debates. Unfortunately, this very simple and, on reflection, very obvious fact seems to elude a number of well-known scientists who, in the course of publishing best-selling works of popular science, have taken the opportunity to pour scorn on philosophy. They should follow the lead of their wiser and greater forebears, including Newton and Einstein, who were far from being unphilosophical in their thinking, and whose philosophical cast of mind contributed in a major way to the originality and importance of their theories.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews E.J. Lowe.

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My book on disgust is about the nature of that emotion, as it now exists, not about its evolutionary origins. Similarly one might write a book about knowledge and not bother too much with how knowledge evolved millions of years ago. As it happens, I have recently completed a book about human evolution and the hand. Both types of investigation are worthwhile.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Colin McGinn.

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I can’t tell you any reason that Kathy Acker, my mother, and my dog Peggy would become linked in a text other than that they all died, and I witnessed it. Any effort I could make to be random would never escape that: it bends my light. There are slight overlaps like gender, and they fact that both women knew and loved my dog, but in the end the book reckons with the unrepresentable, not what is known. So maybe this brings me right back around to Kathy despite myself. Our last conversations were really about the unknown, about death, but they were always in the form of allegories or dreams. She couldn’t say she was dying, so everything happened in fragments or between the lines.

Maxi Kim interviews Matias Viegener.

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I don’t find it satisfactory merely to add some considerations of care to the traditional moral theories for reasons similar to why it is not enough to simply insert women into the traditional structures of society and politics built on gender domination. Feminists should understand that the structures themselves have to change. The history of ethics shows it to be a very biased enterprise. Very roughly, what men have done in public life has been deemed important and relevant to moral theory, and what women have done in the household has been considered irrelevant.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Virginia Held.

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Focusing on the danger of the category “pornography” in this case entails ignoring the ways in which certain subjects (BDSM practitioners, “perverts”) are being marginalsed and, indeed, criminalised, while the vanilla heterosexual mainstream is ignored or even exculpated. For me, legal, hegemonic, heterosexual commercial pornography is much more ethically pernicious than niche kink porn, as it reifies and falsifies, by means of endless repetition, ideas of “normal” male and female sexuality, that are made in the context of a patriarchal and capitalistic society and reflect its fantasies and beliefs.

Richard Marshall interviews Lisa Downing.

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I find myself increasingly frustrated by the whole analytic-continental opposition, it seems less and less relevant to my actual philosophical work, and whereas once I thought there was the possibility of opening up genuine dialogue between the two traditions, I now think that is a vain hope. Moreover, even though, as I say, I tend to identify politically with the non-analytic, I don’t find myself altogether at home in either the analytic or continental camp. In this respect, I probably occupy a rather anomalous position in the contemporary landscape of academic philosophy (maybe ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘philosophical topography’ are necessarily anomalous) – in fact, officially, I am no longer even in a philosophy department – and in lots of ways that anomalous position actually suits me quite well. What I do as a philosopher doesn’t fit readily into any of the usual categories, and I am more and more engaged outside of the discipline anyway – although there other sets of political distinction and division often become operative as well.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jeff Malpas.

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Long before these argument were summarised in the legal texts, they had been elaborated by a number of Roman moralists and historians, above all Sallust, Livy and Tacitus. These writers were interested in the broader question of what it means to say of individuals – or even of whole bodies of people – that they have been made to live in the manner of slaves. The answer they give is that, if you are subject to the arbitrary will of anyone else, such that you are dependent on their mere goodwill, then you may be said to be living in servitude, however elevated may be your position in society.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Quentin Skinner.

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The connection of erotic love with a whole way of life is what leads some thinkers, like Sartre, to criticise love as inherently manipulative and a means of domination. And the connection of the idea of erotic love with a larger philosophical outlook on the world is evident in the writings of philosophers on the subject. In a sense, the history of the idea of erotic love offers an angle on the history of Western philosophy as well.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Kathleen Higgins.

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In periods of revolution, Marx says, revolutionaries conjure the ghosts of the past to help them. The wardrobes and dressing up boxes of history are raided, and names, slogans and costumes tried on for size. The danger is that revolutionaries repeat what has happened as farce, merely parodying what has gone before. For me, the three authors I mention do more than simply parody past glories. They understand that the literary gesture itself is parodic. Bolaño, perhaps more than Vila-Matas and Bernhard, foregrounds the grotesquery of this parody.

Antônio Xerxenesky interviews Lars Iyer.

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I think recognition of the relative value of life is limited to some cultures, and at the risk of being offensive I’ll add that it is limited to the more mature and sophisticated cultures. As for the shift from seeing suicide as cowardly to seeing it as wise, it is a welcome change but a very dangerous one. If it becomes engrained in popular culture and thinking it will cease to be adequately reflective and will lead to perilous expectations.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews C.G. Prado.

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