philopapers

Lachlan Dale considers a naturalistic view of Buddhism. Robert Wright’s book, Why Buddhism Is True: The Science And Philosophy Of Meditation And Enlightenment (2017) is part of the ‘Secular Buddhist’ movement – a project which seeks to strip away the religion’s metaphysical and mystical content and ground it in a naturalistic or science-based interpretation. In […]

We seek purpose and enlightenment as Stephen Anderson attempts to understand Raymond Tallis’s attempt to understand our understanding of the world. We are sometimes slow to recognize any downside to our modern age’s mad enthusiasm for scientific achievement, technological advancement, globalization, bureaucratic rationalization and the proliferation of information. But philosophers have highlighted the paradox of

Melissa Merritt considers the logic of Immanuel Kant. It is well known that Immanuel Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason to establish metaphysics as a science. At the outset of the Critique, Kant considers what this effort might learn from successful examples of scientific inquiry – mentioning logic first of all, which he claims

Richard Baron wonders what changes in our own thinking it would take to live with sociable robots. The robots are coming. Many are already here. They perform surgery, assemble cars, fetch and carry in warehouses, and clean floors. These robots are simply tools which do the jobs we give them, even when they use a

Melissa Merritt considers the logic of Immanuel Kant. It is well known that Immanuel Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason to establish metaphysics as a science. At the outset of the Critique, Kant considers what this effort might learn from successful examples of scientific inquiry – mentioning logic first of all, which he claims

Richard Baron wonders what changes in our own thinking it would take to live with sociable robots. The robots are coming. Many are already here. They perform surgery, assemble cars, fetch and carry in warehouses, and clean floors. These robots are simply tools which do the jobs we give them, even when they use a

Mark Neocleous reviews John Cowley’s book The Victorian Encounter with Marx: A Study of Ernest Belfort Bax. One of my favourite titles for a book is Strange Communists I have Known by Betram Wolfe. What baffles me is why it is so short; the author clearly couldn’t have known many communists, since the communist movement

A review by Nicholas Everitt. Colin McGinn is best known for his demanding texts in the philosophy of mind, so to see his name on this work is a double surprise, both of topic and of level. For this is very much a beginner’s guide, a guide not so much to moral philosophy as to

A review by Geoff Wade. This book – while not for the faint-hearted – is certainly accessible to anyone willing to put in some effort (well rewarded effort), be they ‘academics’ or not. The work explores and explicates the contiguity and confluence of ideology, ethics and art. It is an immensely interesting, informative, controversial, and

A review by Geoff Wade. I found Seidler’s book interesting, wellinformed, controversial and lucid, if somewhat repetitive. The focus, largely, is on our inheritance of the metamorphosis that occurred in feminist (and other) theories during the heady days of the late Sixties, when notions of gender underwent a rigorous scrutiny, and ‘gender’ was redefined. This