3:AM Magazine

It’s fashionable to say that the analytic-continental divide is outdated, and it’s certainly true that there are more and more philosophers who read and work across any borders we may try to designate. The fact remains that you can be an eminent metaphysician in the anglophone world and never have read a word of Heidegger, Deleuze or Badiou, or be famous on the Continent for your philosophy of language and have no interest in Quine or Putnam. Is it just that the two styles of philosophising are different, that continentals can’t understand the complexities of rigourous logical analysis and argument and that analytics can’t penetrate the thickets of a philosophical version of literary modernism? This isn’t likely.

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

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Today we struggle to make sense of immateriality and, notwithstanding Kripke and others continue to find difficulty with the idea of necessity as something that belongs to reality as it is in itself. Aquinas, by contrast, sees the world of materiality and contingency as a limited reflection or consequence of an order that is simpler and purer, and structured rationally and axiologically, i.e. according to orders of value. His primary notions of necessity (and of possibility) are ontological and arise out of the idea of a nature or essence.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews John Haldane.

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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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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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Aristotle had a crucial insight about philosophical methodology: it thrives on disagreement. Typically, when he wants to work out a theory about something – about the soul, or the nature of change, or the good – he starts by taking a look at what other people have said about that subject, and he acknowledges that although they contradict each other, much of what they say has some initial appeal. That’s still a common way to teach philosophy. It’s not the way science is taught, and some people regard this as an indication that philosophy is intellectually inferior to science. But the fact that they have different methods doesn’t show that there is something suspect about philosophy.

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

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