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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 S. Bush takes on the difficult task of building an account of William James’s democratic political thought. As Bush notes, a number of scholars have dismissed the idea that James had anything to say politically, with the exception of a few condemnations of lynching. Bush clearly succeeds in rebutting those dismissive of James as

This book is a collection of interesting papers edited by Walter Ott and Lydia Patton. It fills an oft-noted gap in the laws literature: namely, connecting familiar contemporary accounts to their early modern predecessors. Chapters one through six describe and evaluate several different notions of laws that appear in early modern history and explore how

Roger Karny takes another look at liberty and alienation. The New York Times called the 1953 novel The Outsider by African-American author Richard Wright (1908-1963) “prophetic… a book people should ponder”. The Outsider’s protagonist, Cross Damon, is an African-American intellectual who majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago. Victimized by white oppression, he is

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