philopapers

Lucy Weir thinks about climate ethics with Robin Attfield. Robin Attfield, an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University and a key figure in environmental ethics, begins The Ethics of the Climate Crisis (2024) by laying out in clear, quantitative detail why the climate, pollution, and biodiversity crises require our urgent attention. As he says, […]

Rachel R. Rosner responds to new concepts of exile. Since Hamas’s heinous attack on Israel on October 7th 2023 – what some are calling ‘Israel’s 9/11’ – the world has seen a frenzy of claims for and against Israel’s right to exist and the justness of its military response. As the months have gone by,

Grant Bartley replies philosophically to a scientific history of everything. This book tells the story of humanity in the most epic terms. It’s the saga of how we got here, from the start of the universe until now. Specifically, The Universal History of Us (2024), which in the States is called The Science of Why

T.W.J. Moxham reads Slavoj Žižek’s little book of Hegelian horrors. In order to change humanity’s fate, to avoid catastrophe, we must perceive the future differently, redefining its trajectory; only if we make a radical change within ourselves can this be achieved. This is the premise of Too Late To Awaken, the latest work by the

Christopher John Searle recommends a study of which moves are allowed in logical arguments. Gillian Russell is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. In her new book Barriers to Entailment: Hume’s Law and Other Limits on Logical Consequence, she ventures into the intricate terrain of obstacles to logical entailment, particularly focusing on Hume’s

David McKay enjoys Stuart Jeffries’ lively take on postmodernism. Another book on post modernism? Isn’t that yesterday’s news? Or maybe last decade’s? Surely postmodernism has been analysed virtually to death; and hasn’t contemporary thought moved on, anyway? To some degree that may be true: the label ‘postmodern’ is perhaps not attached to ideas and practices

Jane O’Grady mulls over two new books by Thomas Nagel. No books by Thomas Nagel have appeared since he startled academia with his controversial Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False in 2012. Now there are two at once. Analytic Philosophy and Human Life is a collection of

Andrew Strebkov considers animals to be unlikely humanitarians. Dr Benjamin Meiches’ main (academic) interests lie in armed conflict, genocide, and international law. An associate professor of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at Washington University, he is known in the field (and no, I don’t mean the battlefield) for his book, The Politics of Annihilation. He’s

Hugo Whately argues that analysing the problems of philosophy’s history is doing philosophy. At the start of her career in philosophy, Regan Penaluna thought that “contemplating eternal truths” was the “closest a human could come to immortality” (How To Think Like A Woman, pp.248-9), by reflecting “human thought at its greatest magnitude… [embodying] a culture’s

Andrew Hyams recognises what fuels protest movements. Throughout the last decade, social protest movements have filled our TV screens and newsfeeds. From Occupy and the Arab Spring, to the Yellow Vests, Extinction Rebellion, the Women’s Marches and Black Lives Matter, people power is as alive as ever. Sadly, it also remains as controversial as ever,