3:AM Magazine

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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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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The experimentalists think that we can only get at our concepts by way of empirical investigation, while the armchair philosophers think that we can skip the experiments and figure things out from our armchairs. What they have in common, however, is regarding our concepts as the targets of philosophical theorising, and I just don’t think that, in the vast majority of cases, the subject matter of philosophy has our concepts as its target.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Hilary Kornblith.

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A more robust notion of difference entails adopting a stance of wonder, curiosity, and humility, a stance that allows you to consider the possibility that the experience and perspective of the other isn’t comparable to yours at all, but is qualitatively different. Just imagine how current political discourse concerning women’s health and reproductive autonomy would be transformed if men were seen as limited, as not capable of adopting an authoritative stance on the realities of pregnancy and birth control, and women were seen as having knowledge and experience that necessarily exceeded the understandings that men had of such phenomena. I think such an approach would lead to less gender inequality, not more.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ann Cahill.

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I enjoy political philosophy, political psychology, and the economics of public decision-making. But I’m not interested in politics per se. I don’t watch conventions. I don’t campaign. If there’s a theme in my recent work, it’s that we have too much reverence for political power and government. We have a romantic view that through government, we can come together and make decisions together in a way that expresses our status as equals. On the contrary, I think a good society is one in which politics doesn’t matter very much.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jason Brennan.

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I like very much the idea that nature – including human beings – might have hidden powers, some of which have not yet even been conceived. My view of technology is that it is all about the discovery and then utilization of hitherto unknown powers. And similarly, there may be undeveloped potential within people. I see the role of education as empowering people: developing their potential and also giving people new abilities. And the more one is empowered, the more opportunities are open to one.

Continuing the End Times Series, Richard Marshall interviews Stephen Mumford.

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In the USA, we learn “art history” as western art history, and the history of Asian, or African art is a special case; we learn politics by examining our own government system, and consider other systems special cases, and the same is true of philosophy. And that parochialism is matched by similar parochialisms every place else. It is a bad idea. Each of us ends up thinking that we grow up at the Middle Pole, and that while there is diversity in the world, it is all deviations from normal – our way or doing things. The goal of education should be to dismantle the Middle Pole view, not to reinforce it in the name of the need for a grounding in one’s own civilisation.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jay L. Garfield.

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It turns out that different groups of people have significantly different philosophical intuitions and that philosophical cognition turns out to be sensitive to a host of things that we neither expected nor perhaps wanted it to be, and this raises important epistemological questions about whose philosophical intuitions to trust and when to trust them. Now, at this point it would be natural to wonder, what are philosophical intuitions? And, it turns out there are a range of conceptions, from those that identify philosophical intuitions as instances of fairly generic and uncontroversial kinds of mental states or episodes (usually, beliefs or inclinations to believe) to those that include additional semantic, phenomenological, etiological, or methodological features.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Joshua Alexander.

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