3:AM Magazine

Habermas has a rare and enviable capacity to sense the issues that are relevant to the present. In the mid-1980s he was among the most vocal opponents of the right-wing historiographers in the Historian Controversy, whom he accused of wanting to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime, in the interests of normalizing West German foreign policy. More recently he has engaged in debates around gene technology and their threat to our self-understanding as autonomous moral persons. He has been true to his own view that the task of the public intellectual is to “stir up critical developments when everyone else is still doing business as usual.” Philosophers should do more of that. As a bunch, we tend to be too inward looking.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Gordon Finlayson.

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A science of concepts would be like a science of Tuesdays. As you can imagine, not all psychologists are thrilled!

But this view has a silver lining for psychologists. If I am correct, there are a bunch of exciting empirical questions that have been ignored by psychologists, and that should be tackled urgently. These include, How are the concepts organized? Do some concepts have priority over others? How are resulting conflicts resolved? Are they triggered in different contexts? And what is the relevant mechanism? How are different types of concepts acquired?

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Edouard Machery.

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Hegelian scholars have often divided themselves between “metaphysical” and “non-metaphysical” readings of his work. This distinction is misleading. It leads to the mistaken view that non-metaphysical readings of Hegel’s work deny there is metaphysics to be found. A further problem is that “metaphysical” readings will often overemphasise Hegel’s views about Geist and religion – as if their opponents deny their relevance – which defend a reading of Hegel’s text at the expense of making them more penetrable or defensible. “Non-metaphysical” readings typically overstate other elements presenting a reading perhaps more philosophical defensible, but at a lack of deep connection with the text. Too often a claim about “Hegel’s theory of x” is perhaps more a reflection of “my new theory of x” concealed behind the illusion that Hegel argues for the same.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Thom Brooks.

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And perhaps there are different sorts of prerequisites for other forms of understanding: perhaps volitional or emotional prerequisites. Tolstoy for instance once claimed that “without love there is no understanding.” I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that, but perhaps it is the idea that without love, or sympathy, or something along those lines, you cannot truly understand another person. Similarly, St. Augustine was fond of saying “unless you believe you will not understand,” suggesting that there is a kind of volitional aspect to certain sorts of understanding, and perhaps especially to religious understanding.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Stephen R. Grimm.

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I like, and have quoted, a remark that David Lewis made in the introduction to his first collection of papers: “I should have liked to be a piecemeal, unsystematic philosopher, offering independent proposals on a variety of topics. It was not to be.” He tried to be a fox, but couldn’t help turning into a hedgehog. I suspect that the best hedgehogs – those that are not blinded by their big idea – come to their systematic theory in something like this way, and that the best foxes see the interconnections between their different projects, and the general ideas that motivate them, even if they resist building them into one grand system.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert Stalnaker.

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A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a ‘downwards’ causal influence on the physical realm in a straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that mental, biological and social phenomena must themselves be physical, in order to produce the physical effects that they do.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews David Papineau.

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I was fascinated early on by the incompleteness theorems and the independence phenomenon, by the idea that one could prove things about the nature of proof itself. We can prove that our fundamental mathematical theories are simply unable in principle to validate themselves, to prove their own consistency, like the fantastic pronouncements of a strange gentleman whom we are unsure is a con man or a sage. For every such theory, furthermore, there will be true statements that we are unable to prove in them, and so ultimately none of our fundamental theories can have the whole story. The idea that we can prove such things about the nature of truth and provability was incredible to me, and I sought to get to the bottom of it.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Joel David Hamkins.

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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 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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