Roughly sixty years ago, certain interpreters dragged the study of Plato’s dialogues into the modern world by subjecting them to analytic philosophical methods. So goes the prevailing history of Plato scholarship. With this development, specialists could explain their research to their colleagues using familiar modern categories, and — what is perhaps just another way of …
Philosophy as Drama: Plato’s Thinking through Dialogue Read More »
Dialetheism (or, more simply, “glut theory” as dual of familiar truth-value “gap theories”) is the view according to which there are true contradictions. Quite a hard view to legitimate, which explains why it seems to have only very few genuine supporters. Yet, it is not, or it is supposed not to be, confused with the …
This timely collection of essays explores a bustling area of moral epistemology, namely, how higher-order evidence affects the rationality of moral beliefs. Arguments from disagreement between moral peers and evolutionary debunking arguments both employ higher-order evidence to try to establish that some/many/all of our moral beliefs are unjustified and do not amount to knowledge. Epistemology …
Set theory is widely regarded as the foundation for (nearly) all of mathematics. This raises the question of what a set is and what sets there are. According to the famous iterative conception, sets are “formed” in stages: we start at stage zero with some individuals, or nonsets; at stage one, we form all sets of …
Conceptions of Set and the Foundations of Mathematics Read More »
In this well-argued, engaging book, Peter Carruthers makes a comprehensive case for a global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness, and considers the upshot for animals: are they phenomenally conscious, and does it matter morally? His answer: there is no fact of the matter about whether animals are phenomenally conscious, but this doesn’t change anything morally, …
Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest Read More »