philopapers

Alfred Geier says it’s not about the state of the state. The Republic is Plato’s most famous dialogue, contains many of his best-known arguments and is one of the great classics of world literature. It is also the victim of a serious and widespread misconception, in that it is held to present a political utopia, a polis [city state] to […]

Why do we feel emotion when listening to music? Ben Ushedo goes beyond emotivist and cognitivist approaches to answer this intriguing question. “Music can make me feel tense or relaxed; it can disturb, unsettle me, and startle me; it can calm me down or excite me…”Jennifer Robinson, ‘Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music’. What

Philosophers working on the epistemology of disagreement have asked how one ought, if at all, to revise one’s beliefs or credences when confronted with facts about others who disagree. For it can seem at first blush that the mere existence of disagreement, at least when it is with those who are roughly one’s peers with

Tom Cochrane’s book forges into the philosophy of emotion on a new and powerful vehicle: the idea of valent representations. His project is ambitious. Cochrane uses valent representations to give models of affect, pleasure and pain, emotion, moods, expressive behavior, social intentionality, norms, collective effervescence, inner speech, sentiments, personality, and character. Philosophers interested in any of these topics

Declan Smithies’ book is an extraordinarily strong contribution to debates in philosophy of mind and epistemology. It is ambitious and expansive in scope while being extremely rigorously argued. It will be required reading for epistemologists, as well as for philosophers of mind interested in the value of consciousness for our lives as thinkers and knowers.

In this fine collection, Christian Seidel has brought together innovative new work on consequentialism, with a special focus on the theoretical strategy of “consequentializing” agent-centered (deontological) moral theories. It is an excellent resource for anyone seeking to better understand and evaluate the conceptual foundations of consequentialism. Seidel’s introduction is a real strength of the book,

Joseph C. Pitt’s slim new book argues persuasively that the philosopher’s traditional focus on theories as the essence of science is misplaced. This kind of objection is frequently leveled at philosophers by historians and those in science studies, and for good reason. Pitt’s critique is much broader and more interesting than the typical one since

In the introduction to the book, Sarah McGrath explains her key aims. She has an overall working hypothesis: moral knowledge can be acquired in any of the ways in which we acquire ordinary empirical knowledge, and our efforts to acquire and preserve such knowledge are subject to frustration in all of the same ways that our

When you were born into the world, you began with a basic repertoire of sensory-perceptual experiences representing the world around you. On the basis of those experiences, you acquired beliefs and desires about things in your environment. Then you learned a language and became able to think about a great many things far outside of

Roughly sixty years ago, certain interpreters dragged the study of Plato’s dialogues into the modern world by subjecting them to analytic philosophical methods. So goes the prevailing history of Plato scholarship. With this development, specialists could explain their research to their colleagues using familiar modern categories, and — what is perhaps just another way of