philopapers

Richard Baron wonders what changes in our own thinking it would take to live with sociable robots. The robots are coming. Many are already here. They perform surgery, assemble cars, fetch and carry in warehouses, and clean floors. These robots are simply tools which do the jobs we give them, even when they use a […]

Melissa Merritt considers the logic of Immanuel Kant. It is well known that Immanuel Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason to establish metaphysics as a science. At the outset of the Critique, Kant considers what this effort might learn from successful examples of scientific inquiry – mentioning logic first of all, which he claims

Richard Baron wonders what changes in our own thinking it would take to live with sociable robots. The robots are coming. Many are already here. They perform surgery, assemble cars, fetch and carry in warehouses, and clean floors. These robots are simply tools which do the jobs we give them, even when they use a

Mark Neocleous reviews John Cowley’s book The Victorian Encounter with Marx: A Study of Ernest Belfort Bax. One of my favourite titles for a book is Strange Communists I have Known by Betram Wolfe. What baffles me is why it is so short; the author clearly couldn’t have known many communists, since the communist movement

A review by Nicholas Everitt. Colin McGinn is best known for his demanding texts in the philosophy of mind, so to see his name on this work is a double surprise, both of topic and of level. For this is very much a beginner’s guide, a guide not so much to moral philosophy as to

A review by Geoff Wade. This book – while not for the faint-hearted – is certainly accessible to anyone willing to put in some effort (well rewarded effort), be they ‘academics’ or not. The work explores and explicates the contiguity and confluence of ideology, ethics and art. It is an immensely interesting, informative, controversial, and

A review by Geoff Wade. I found Seidler’s book interesting, wellinformed, controversial and lucid, if somewhat repetitive. The focus, largely, is on our inheritance of the metamorphosis that occurred in feminist (and other) theories during the heady days of the late Sixties, when notions of gender underwent a rigorous scrutiny, and ‘gender’ was redefined. This

A review by Mike Fuller. Whatever the estimate of it by academic philosophers in their cloistered wisdom, it can hardly be doubted that the phenomenon known as “New Age Thought” represents to many people the most vital philosophy currently on offer. Of course, it’s also true that very few people, if any at all, understand

A review by Tim Chappell. It’s been a busy thirty years in the Philosophy of Mind – as is immediately apparent when you pick up Rosenthal’s book. If you have back problems, be careful how you do this. This is a volume over 650 pages long when prefaces, etc., have been counted, and, according to the

John Mann reviews The Recovery of the Soul by Kenneth Rankin A few months ago a special time-share promotion mail shot appeared inviting people to attend an evening presentation at the end of which a wonderful prize of either a car, a colour TV, a video recorder, a holiday or a set of steak knives would be given