3:AM Magazine

I kept discovering philosophers advancing contextualist theses to dissolve one ancient philosophical conundrum or another. Suspicious from the beginning, I wondered how generations of philosophers could have missed so much context sensitivity. No one missed the context sensitivity of “I”, “now” and “here”; can it really be that different with “know” and “heap” and “penguin”? More interestingly, the very same epistemologists, metaphysicians, logicians, ethicists, and aestheticians who told me philosophy of language was dead were now advocating a rather liberal position on the scope of context sensitivity in natural language. That’s philosophy of language, alive and flourishing, after all.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ernie Lepore.

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The fact that we have inconsistent intuitions gives empirical evidence for revisionism. If people really give different answers to “is free will compatible with determinism” and “is determinism compatible with free will,” then that’s an argument for saying that what we should think about free will conflicts with at least some of what we do think about free will. When you hear a solution to the compatibility question, you shouldn’t expect everything to feel like “ah, mystery solved, that all makes sense.” You should expect to still feel deeply puzzled, even if you have the right solution. I think that there are great non-experimental arguments that lead to revisionism, but I also think that experimental philosophy can also give evidence for revisionism. So if you dismiss experimental philosophy from the outset, you’re going to miss considerations that speak directly to the original philosophical questions.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Chris Weigel.

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You’re right that it’s tricky to say what exactly objectivity (or relativity, or subjectivity) means, so I am happy to bypass it. Why does it matter whether a discourse is objective, or captures objective facts? It seems to me that the distinction between the two kinds of disagreement and conflict, according to what the appropriate moral response to them are captures something important, significant, and pretty close to what many of us have in mind when we talk about objectivity.

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

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Holism makes hopeless semantics; it simply can’t be true that the content of each of one’s beliefs depends on the content of each of the others. Since the reasons are familiar, I won’t review them here; suffice it that, if there is to be a belief-desire psychology at all, it must leave room for the piecemeal alterations of beliefs and desires. This is to say that epistemological holism (which I take to be more or less true) is incompatible with semantic holism (which I take to be false root and branch.).

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jerry Fodor.

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At an everyday level we wonder about how things would have gone had we acted otherwise, and might feel regret or relief based upon the answer. At a more abstract level it is natural to think that your responsibility for your actions depends on whether (and in what I think is the same sense) you might have done otherwise in the circumstances. At a more abstract level still you might wonder whether determinism entails that nothing could have been otherwise. And at the most abstract level you have philosophers saying that 2 + 2 = 4 is something that could not have been otherwise, and wondering whether Obama might possibly have been a light switch, and so on.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Arif Ahmed.

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A favourite image Quine got from Otto Neurath is as perfect as such things can be: we are all sailing the same ship, which we must repair without without docking, without sinking. Not unconnected with this is Quine’s naturalism: knowledge is what is delivered in the first instance by natural science, with its various norms, strictures and presuppositions. Which is not, I hasten to add, something known by obscure a priori means; it’s a fallible claim derived from reflection on knowledge as we have it. And did I say that Quine is an empiricist? He is.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Gary Kemp.

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I would say that properly understood, science is adding to the potential of living the good life because it helps us better see the kind of animals we are. We are animals with powerful feelings and subconscious motivations, but we are also reflective animals who talk in normative terms and care about doing things for good reasons. Of course we are “just animals”, but this doesn’t mean that we are just a bundle of uncontrolled motivations. We are more than that, because of our complicated brains, though nothing that we are is something supernatural. I don’t know how radical a change this is. I don’t find it that radical, but I wasn’t raised to believe that we have non-natural souls. I do find it requires a change of self-image to realise that I’m not in control of what I do as much as I thought I was, but I don’t find this to be a fundamental kind of change. It’s a matter of degree.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Valerie Tiberius.

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Fish have eyes and ears (though not external ears but hidden ear-like structures) and a sense of smell, and the behavior they engage in on the basis of the information they glean from these senses shows considerable flexibility. Fish learn to recognize markings and patterns, to avoid artificially colored, unpleasant-tasting fish they would normally eat, to solve problems in order to reach feeding places. Fish can find their way through mazes and they defer to other fish that are better at finding their way through when they are in groups. Cumulatively the evidence seems best explained by supposing that fish often make cognitive classifications or assessments, directly in response to the information conveyed to them by their senses, and that these, together with their goals, often determine their behavior.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michae Tye.

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The aporias of the present is that there really is no aesthetic criticism anymore, and that there are really no standards about art. Anything goes, and anything is good or excellent “in its own kind”. We got here because some aestheticians and philosophers took the avant-garde too seriously, and held that even snow shovels, urinals and soup cans can be works of art. I think that the avant-garde was making all kinds of interesting and valid points; but one it was not making is that these kinds of things are works of art. They were not intended to be works of art but, for all kinds of complicated philosophical social and political reasons, works of anti-art. There really are standards of criticism, and there really are rules of art, even though people shudder at the very thought of them.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Frederick Beiser.

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I am a little bit reluctant to sell philosophy as something which is attractive as such. But to philosophically minded people, it has indeed a lot to offer. Let me start with a comparison. As an activity, philosophy is extremely challenging and thrilling, comparable with climbing or hiking. Solving a philosophical problem or finding a convincing answer to a philosophical question is like trying to get on to the top of an impressive mountain. You have to deal with hard stuff; you focus on one particular mountain, while watching many others; it needs all your skills and technique to get on the top, but it also requires discipline and sometimes even dedication. Arriving there is extremely satisfying, but there is always the risk that you won’t arrive.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ursula Renz.

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