philopapers

Published in Blackwell’s Contemporary Social Issues series, Taking Moral Action has as its goal, “to provide a first overview of the emerging but highly fragmented field of moral psychology. . .for both those beginning in the field and those deep in the weeds and thickets of theoretical controversy” (xiii). Chuck Huff, an American social psychologist, and Almut […]

Annabel Abbs follows Simone de Beauvoir’s thoughts over the horizon. A few years ago I bought the book A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros (2014). This entertaining volume featured a parade of thinkers for whom walking was profoundly important: Thoreau, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Kant; even Gandhi, Kerouac and Rimbaud made appearances. Walking, Gros suggested, was

Sam Kelly says Jean-Paul Sartre was the Hunter S. Thompson of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is perhaps the most famous exponent of existentialism. His philosophy asserts that human beings are cursed with the impossible burden of having to make decisions without any higher justifications. There is no God or other transcendent force to dictate what

Eva Cybulska asks who Oedipus thinks he is. The myth of Oedipus is very old. It first appeared in written form in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. Aeschylus and Euripides wrote plays about the hero, as did Julius Caesar, Ovid and Seneca, and more recently Andr é Gide and Jean Cocteau. But the greatest version of

Robert Harries says that playing this game is a Sisyphean task, and represents the human spirit up against a meaningless fate. In 1984 in the former Soviet Union, a computer engineer by the name of Alexey Pajitnov created the mega-selling computer game, Tetris. Its format, known to everyone who has ever played a games consol,

Philip Villamor rethinks Albert Camus’ famous rock’n’roll parable. The gods condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain. It is an unending sequence of events: he arduously pushes the rock up the mountain, the rock rolls back down, Sisyphus follows it back down and then begins the task again. Yet

According to a traditional view, whether a subject is in an epistemic state like knowledge (justified belief, etc.) depends only on epistemic, truth-related factors like reliability or evidence. According to a relatively recent view, the pragmatic encroachment view, this also depends on non-epistemic, pragmatic factors like what is practically at stake for the subject. If

Stephen Small on defining other people and ourselves. We live our lives in the shadow of other people. Others fill and to a significant degree constitute our world. After many centuries of history we remain social animals, but our identity and its origins remain an issue for us. Although we easily imagine ourselves alone on

This is a research monograph suitable for professional philosophers and graduate students working on any of the first order issues in metaphysics, but also (importantly) those interested in metaphilosophical issues, especially as these arise in metaphysics — addressing the latter issues is the core aim, though not to the exclusion of the former. The first

Michael Rockler scrutinizes the private investigator’s existentialist credentials. Perhaps the most popular existential work of the 20th century was written by a man who has not usually been identified as a philosopher, but whose work clearly embodies existential themes. Dashiell Hammett, creator of the hard-boiled detective novel, applied an existential viewpoint to his writing. His