philopapers

This is a collection of essays most of which have been published before, between 2001 and 2018. They all deal with John Rawls’ political philosophy, defending it against various criticisms and what Freeman takes to be misinterpretations. The essays are of admirable clarity, arguing for their positions in meticulous detail. For those interested in a […]

Understanding the imagination was central to Sartre’s attempts to understand what it is to be human, and how we should live. Maria Antonietta Perna thinks he had important insights which are still worth considering. What is imagination? The word itself seems to be used in at least two different ways, and as this ambiguity is

What are actions? In this densely-argued and thought-provoking work, David-Hillel Ruben sets out to answer this question, by way of an examination of some of the ideas that have gained currency over the last 50 years or so of philosophy of action — including what is usually called ‘the standard story’; the view that actions

Matthew Coniam says that Groundhog Day explains existentialism more entertainingly than Sartre. Groundhog Day (1993) was one of the most critically acclaimed and popular American film comedies of the nineteen-nineties, admired both for its warm-hearted romance and for the delightful comic absurdity of its central premise. In this article I aim to show that it

How do we know what we believe, want, intend, or feel? In other words, how do we come to possess knowledge of our own minds? One historically influential answer to this question is that we know the contents of our minds via introspection. We “look inward” to determine what mental states we token. And when

An introduction to our existential special issue by Anja Steinbauer. Existentialism as a philosophical movement stretches from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. Its leading figures included such giants as Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre. These thinkers had very different approaches and

This book brings together a thoughtfully curated collection of essays that offers Kierkegaard as an important resource for anyone thinking through the intersection of religion, ethics, and social life in twenty-first century contexts. And, of course, one is not surprised that navigating this particular intersection also involves rich engagements with philosophy and literature. The collection

Stuart Hanscomb argues that existentialism is punk philosophy par excellence. Whenever I’m asked “So, what exactly is existentialism?” I experience a sinking feeling. It’s a difficult philosophy to explain; efforts typically end up trivializing or obfuscating so much about it that is important, original, and relevant. A number of things account for this, but an

Baruch (or Benedict) de Spinoza is best known for two books: the Ethica (E), completed in 1675 but only published in his Opera Posthuma of 1677; and the Tractatus theologico-politicus (TTP), published anonymously in 1670. Although these books are widely held to be masterpieces today, much ink has been spilled over the question of how the two books are related given

Lucian Lupescu says the disputatious Dane dares us to live. There is a general tendency in the non-philosophical world to dismiss philosophy as being purely theoretical, with no connection to the types of problems that people are confronted within their everyday lives. But this is not necessarily true. Many philosophers struggled to find ways to