In this timely book, Toby Ord argues that there is a one in six chance that humanity will suffer an existential catastrophe within the next 100 years, and that minimizing this risk should be a major global priority. We live in an age of heightened existential risk, due to such powerful technologies as nuclear weapons, …
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity Read More »
Structural injustice is a compelling topic. This is in part because its currency in contemporary discourse has exceeded the intensity of its philosophical discussion. Claims of structural injustice are increasingly familiar, but this has not been prompted by theoretical developments; if anything, philosophy has some catching up to do. The other compelling feature in the …
Structural Injustice: Power, Advantage, and Human Rights Read More »
The book is a collection of thirteen essays devoted to themes in formal epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics and logic. Robert C. Stalnaker advertises it as a spiritual successor to his 1984 classic Inquiry. Indeed, the book is like Inquiry in two important respects. For one obvious thing, it follows a similar structural arc. Much as Inquiry‘s first half is devoted to …
Knowledge and Conditionals: Essays on the Structure of Inquiry Read More »
Many of us have spent a considerable amount of 2020 working and teaching in a much more solitary environment than we’re used to. Rather than conversing with one another in person, we are instead spending hours and hours staring at one another arranged in little boxes on a computer screen, listening to disembodied voices through …
Ingmar Persson is best known for his work in moral philosophy. Some of his publications have explored the boundary moral philosophy shares with the philosophy of action. But Persson is not someone whose name immediately comes to mind when thinking of the state of play in action theory. So it came as a bit of …
Reasons in Action: A Reductionist Account of Intentional Action Read More »
Interest in Hegel’s Idealism has surged over the past thirty years and shows no sign of slowing. It is increasingly commonplace to view Hegel’s significance as more than mere esotericism in the history of philosophy and sociology. The interpretive camps defining this resurgence are multifarious, but one variation has gained particular traction. Broadly, this interpretive …
Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic Read More »
Pyrrhonian skepticism’s influence on, or relevance to, modern and contemporary epistemology cannot, I think, be overstated. Suffice it to consider the problem of conflicting appearances, the problem of the criterion of truth, the problem of the regress of justification, the epistemic significance of disagreement, and the nature and aim of inquiry and its connection with …
Jacqueline Broad has produced a terrific volume and an invaluable resource for scholars and students. The volume showcases a large selection of letters in which four women philosophers of the early modern period — Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet — exchange views with a number of their prominent philosophical, …
Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-Century England: Selected Correspondence Read More »
Samuel Fleischacker’s book is a very welcome addition both to scholarship on Adam Smith and to the burgeoning field of empathy studies. Fleischacker brings decades of excellent and influential work on Smith to the popular topic of empathy to show that Smithian empathy (Smith uses the term “sympathy” for this capacity), with some updates, has a …
In the United States, a comprehensive immigration reform bill was passed by the Senate in 2013, but eventually failed in the House. This bill was structured around a compromise — increased border security measures were to be exchanged for immigration amnesty for undocumented migrants currently inside the US. Many centrist politicians (including those in the …