3:AM Magazine

As for the funding of the magazine there’s no money coming in and none going out, which I believe is partially responsible for its success. My idea of success, that is. Removing that influential and often dictatorial factor has liberated Paraphilia and preserved its integrity. And that was another motive behind the magazine’s creation: to give phenomenal art – sans the industries’ grip – to anyone who would love and appreciate it. I can’t say for certain that Paraphilia Magazine will always be an entirely non-monetary (ad)venture, but for the time being.

David Hoenigman interviews Díre McCain.

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I am right now dealing with some people who insist that a man in engineering I work closely with on a center we created together is my superior and I am merely his assistant. In fact, a few years ago an anonymous letter from some people obviously in my department was sent to him to warn him off involving me in a project that I in fact created. People seem to be uncertain about whether a woman can do science, and dead certain that a female philosopher has no place in that world.

Continuing the End Times Series, Richard Marshall interviews Anne Jaap Jacobson.

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If all our beliefs are equally hopeless distortions, then it cannot matter what we believe. And if it can’t matter what we believe, then it cannot matter to Nietzsche that, say, Christians believe as they do. Even if it does matter to him, it’s not available to us to ask why, because there can be no reason that could be binding on us, and therefore, it shouldn’t matter to us what Nietzsche thinks about Christian morality or anything else. And so we simply have no reason to read Nietzsche.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jessica Berry.

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I like odd. I write odd. To be honest, I dislike the fact most people are trying to get “fixed”. I was talking about this subject recently with a writer friend. Society is evolving into a state where people strive for normality. Back in the Victorian age, to be fat was considered a sign of wealth and high esteem. Now being fat is a symbol of laziness, depression and loneliness. If someone arranges the labels on their tins of food to face the same way in the cupboard, they have an obsessive disorder, but twenty years ago that same act would have been considered practical. Depression was a symptom cured with ale, and panic attacks were not cured with pills but long walks in the open air.

Christiana Spens interviews Craig Wallwork.

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And here’s the thing, by this time (the 1980s) Sartre was a shunned and despised figure on both sides of the Atlantic. In the world of Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, etc. there was no figure more discredited than Sartre, who represented everything that was outmoded in the dreaded “philosophy of the subject”. And in the analytic departments of philosophy Sartre was treated as a joke. There is plenty to complain about or disagree with in Sartre, as with most philosophers, but this universal contempt seemed to me to have other sources, and was based for the most part on a self-satisfied ignorance of his actual writing. One source was simply his fame, the fact that he became such a media figure in the first great age of electronic media, and many philosophers find that hard to forgive. He fully paid the price of his media presence. In his uses of his celebrity he was like John Lennon in a way.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Richard Moran.

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Often when you asks a philosopher what they work on, they respond ‘in the literature a lot of philosophers have said X, and I think X is wrong’. This is fine when talking to philosophers, but it does nothing to help those outside the subject to know what it is that we do. I wouldn’t say that continental philosophers are much better in this respect, but at least they can offer the answer ‘I work on Deleuze, Heidegger etc.’. Scholars and scientists in other fields can at least guess at what this might involve: sitting in rooms reading long, difficult books. But ‘I work on the concept of truth’ tends to lead to blank stares. So analytic philosophy is not very good at describing itself to the rest of the intellectual community. I think this is a shame because analytic philosophy is an impressive thing, and its achievements should be more widely recognised.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Tim Crane.

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Computer models of mind are trying to give a naturalistic explanation of cognition. Yet these models typically ascribe contents that go beyond anything that is determined by a purely naturalistic relation. So if they are trying to explain meaning by appeal to a naturalistic relation, as most philosophers of mind seem to assume, then they are doing a really bad job of it. And if they are presuming meaning in their models then they are not making much progress on the problem that philosophers of mind are interested in. They are trafficking in more of the same mysterious stuff.

Continung the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Frances Egan.

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We have a tendency to overestimate our access to facts. It relates to our tendency to over-attribute intentionality. We err on the side of believing that there are adversaries out there monitoring our doings. Even a squirrel presumes a branch was thrown rather than that it merely fell. A squirrel that more realistically presumes that the branch fell by coincidence is easier prey. But we should not binge on humble pie. Common sense and science give us plenty of knowledge.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Roy Sorensen.

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When thinking philosophically comes natural to you, then what’s puzzling and slightly bizarre is to not do philosophy. Whatever topic you’re thinking about, you’re never more than two to three ‘Why?’s away from a philosophical question. I’m always puzzled when someone lacks the curiosity to ask those two to three why-questions. Anyone who’s intellectually curious will care about the foundations of what they’re doing and those foundations are invariably, in part, philosophical. So I’m one of those who don’t think philosophising requires much of an explanation, excuse, or justification – lack of philosophical curiosity always strikes me as a pretty reliable sign of intellectual shallowness.

Continuing the End Times Series, Richard Marshall interviews Herman Cappelen.

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I saw the Morden Tower as part of my apprenticeship, as it were, part of my education, to listen to all these different voices and to find out as much as possible. And I wasn’t going to get that from the fucking University, because they weren’t putting on readings; it was as it is now: horribly institutionalised. I think I am a bit of an activist, or certainly have been. I suppose you just have the energy and if you have someone to support you, a partner, that makes it easier. I suppose I was an arrogant bastard and I didn’t like being told to fuck off and I was persistent in trying to get money to keep the thing going. But that wasn’t so difficult when you had the encouragement of Basil and MacDiarmid, who people could appreciate, plus the audiences who were coming, and it was our own place and it seemed pretty much a part of what was happening.

Alex Niven interviews the British poetry revival legend Tom Pickard

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