philopapers

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,

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

David Arndt’s book is an excellent exposition of Arendt’s political thought. Anyone interested in Arendt would benefit from the clear presentation and analysis of the main concepts and ideas Arendt thought through in her writings; the careful distinctions he offers between the meanings Arendt gave to these concepts and the more common understanding of them; and

I Katrina Forrester’s book is an engaging history of John Rawls’s intellectual development and the outpouring of work in political philosophy his ideas have engendered. She focuses on the evolution of Rawls’s theory of justice and the historical conditions from which it purportedly grew in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She discusses the responses of Rawls’s

Uwe Steinhoff is an excellent philosopher. He is analytically exacting, wide ranging, and steeped in many of the central debates. He is also an important critic of the dominant strains of discussion within just war theory. Unfortunately, the book does not live up to Steinhoff’s promise as a theorist. Although there are some insightful interventions in

Raymond Tallis is hungry to expand human consciousness through art. Past and Future In what follows, I shall focus less on what art has been or has meant in the past than on what it might be or might mean in the future. Of course my vision of the future of art is informed and

To introduce our art issue, Anja Steinbauer describes the troubled relationship between art and theory. We might imagine aesthetics, the study of art and beauty, and philosophy as two unhappy partners in a failing relationship, coming to us seeking counselling. “You can’t give me anything”, aesthetics might complain, “you don’t help people appreciate art or

So how do you apply philosophical principles to think about art? An example can be derived from an unlikely source. Reneh Karamians uses Heidegger’s philosophy as an illustration of how to understand aesthetic experience. Martin Heidegger gave philosophy a new description of humanity. No longer was mankind defined in terms of mind distinct from the