philopapers

Philip Badger questions Robert Sapolsky’s determinism. Robert Sapolsky is that rare thing in modern academia, a true polymath. This is evidenced by his multiple and simultaneously held professorships, which range from Anthropology to Neurology, as well as his willingness to stick his nose into what philosophers often consider to be their business. In this case, that […]

We search for freedom this issue, as Kevin Currie points out the many varieties of liberalism. “That’s because you’re a liberal!” my self-identified ‘progressive’ colleague said to me with slight contempt. We were talking about the importance of the right to conscience even when it means the right to hold noxious – maybe racist or sexist –

Rick Lewis reviews Raymond Tallis’s latest book. At this magazine we have a golden rule that we never publish a book review written by someone who is a friend of the author. Nor do we ever print book reviews if they are written by the publishers of those books. (Such reviews are called ‘press releases’). These

Over the past 25 years, philosophers have begun to address the long-standing neglect of the epistemic condition of moral responsibility. Several prominent accounts have emerged, each attempting to answer a fundamental question: when does ignorance excuse an agent from moral responsibility, and when does it not? In this book, Michael Zimmerman solidifies his position as

Philip Badger questions Robert Sapolsky’s determinism. Robert Sapolsky is that rare thing in modern academia, a true polymath. This is evidenced by his multiple and simultaneously held professorships, which range from Anthropology to Neurology, as well as his willingness to stick his nose into what philosophers often consider to be their business. In this case, that

The transparency referred to in the title of Matthew Boyle’s book is Gareth Evans’s highly influential idea that one makes self-ascriptions of belief by directing one’s attention to the relevant worldly facts (Evans, 1980). I answer the question of whether I think it’s going to rain by looking at the sky, not into my soul. The reflection in the

This book sets out in some detail an interesting conception of freedom, according to which being unable to do something (or its being difficult to do), and being dominated in something like the republican sense, are two kinds of unfreedom. This is a conception of freedom as ‘non-constraint’ which recognizes a broad range of constraints

Amir Saemi opens the book by presenting a formidable challenge for today’s religious progressives who accept the authority of ancient scriptures but find commands like the following morally objectionable: As for the thief, whether male or female, cut their hands as a penalty for what they have reaped. (Quran 5:38) The adulteress and the adulterer—whip

In the opening sentences of the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant writes that intuition is that through which cognition relates immediately to objects (A19/B33). He then adds that intuitions belong to the faculty of sensibility, which enables objects to be given to us, while the understanding is the faculty of concepts and thought (A19/B33). Thus, at the very outset of

If to err is human, then so too is to regret. At least if we follow Paddy McQueen in his recent book about the nature, normativity, and politics of regret. According to McQueen, regret is, roughly, a painful feeling of self-reproach or self-recrimination for making a “mistake” (21). Like all emotions, regret is more than