philopapers

James Moran considers the archetypal American antedeluvian’s criticism of someone else’s technological paradise. Henry David Thoreau is one of the best-loved authors in American history, and its most famous chronicler of the simple life. Some might argue that there are utopian elements in Thoreau’s account in Walden (1854) of his two years and two months living in the […]

Marek Soszynski considers whether it couldn’t look like resemblance after all. How do pictures represent in the way they do? How come a picture of a cat, for example, is indeed of a cat – actually has a cat as its object? Or to put it the other way around, how is a cat pictorially

Natasha Gilbert says out with the old arguments, and in with the new. There has been a recent surge of interest in the old problem of free will. But away from time-worn debates over the questions ‘Are we free?’ and ‘Are we morally responsible?’ some fresh waters are at last in reach. As I will

Pablo Cevallos Estarellas reviews the developments that caused professional to triumph over amateur philosophy in education, and proposes a way forward. If to do philosophy is to ask questions of a special kind about central human problems and then to grapple with them in a rigorous way, most people can in principle learn how to

Jan Derry wants to know what it is to know. What is it to be a human knower? This is the question the philosopher Robert Brandom asks in his investigation into the nature of language and of the social practices which distinguish us as creatures of intellect. I will consider his answer to this question.

Kathleen O’Dwyer asks if we can learn how to love, with Erich Fromm and friends. “For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation” Rainer Maria Rilke. “Your task is

Van Harvey considers an unusual critique of Christian love. There have been many atheist critics of Christianity who have argued that its doctrines are intellectually untenable or based on illusion, but few have argued that the Christian notion of love enshrines the highest human virtue, and that this requires those who embrace it to renounce

Bob Harrison questions his identity. Hello, you, this is me – and that’s him. But what are you? And what am I? And what is he? Three questions, and in each case the answer is philosophically interesting. The interest turns on the further question: “What is a person?” John Locke offers a suggestion: “what person

Craig Ross on whether freedom is all it’s been made up to be. Some believe that humans have free will; others that each of our actions and choices is caused by prior events. Compatibilism is the theory that we can be both caused and free. It is advocated by many modern philosophers, including the prolific