Philosophy

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Why Try to be Important?

At least in certain cultures, many people seem to value being important. It is supposed to be a good thing if you become a U.S. President who ends a war or a Nobel-winning novelist who reimagines literature or a scientist who cures a terrible disease.

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Socrates and the Beautiful Girl

What is the Beautiful? In Plato’s Hippias Major, Socrates and the sophist Hippias set out to answer this question. Along the way, they evaluate such answers as ‘the appropriate’, ‘the beneficial’, ‘gold’, and even ‘burying your parents’.…

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Was Kant a mystic?

The great eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), is known for his wide-ranging insights spanning the whole range of philosophical sub-disciplines, from epistemology and metaphysics to ethics and jurisprudence—and everything in between. Indeed, Kant’s influence on aesthetics, history, theology, and the sciences is undeniable.

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Dread, the Demonic, and our Current Situation

Leaving aside the raging pandemic, and recognizing that Covid is not unconnected, there are two crises which define our time. First, the global weakening or collapse of democracy and rise of fascism: e.g., Trumpism in the U.S., repressive Indian Hindu nationalism, conservative Catholicism in Eastern Europe, Chinese “authoritarianism” (market Stalinism?), and whatever is going on in Brazil.

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Art and character: My Ancient Greek dinner guest

In discussing the interconnections of action and character (ethos) in tragedy, Aristotle praises the Greek painter Polygnotos for his “fine depiction of character” (Poetics 1450a27), contrasting his work with that of Zeuxis, who, famous for his realism, does not depict character.…

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Honey, I Shrunk the Philosophers

A dress that looks black and blue to one person looks white and gold to someone else. Where one person hears ‘Yanni,’ another hears ‘Laurel’. A bucket of tepid water feels hot to cold hands but cold to hot hands.

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Mutual recognition or tragedy?

Hegel’s philosophy is notoriously difficult, but when I first studied his Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right in the mid 1970s I was struck by a simple idea that is at the core of both works: you can’t be yourself by yourself, but you need others in order to be who you are.…

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Hegel is Fun

Hegel has a reputation as a difficult philosopher, and often people treat the complexities of his texts as being due to his intensely systematic aims.…

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Hegel’s systematic ambitions

Hegel’s philosophy is shaped by his extreme systematic ambition: He argues that everything is interconnected, in one system, with one source of intelligibility for everything; and he commits to building his system not on a merely assumed foundation, but on arguments that engage philosophers who disagree, or those who are not already within his system.…

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Arguing about sets

Sets are ubiquitous and familiar: children get acquainted with sets of objects surrounding them very early on; secondary school students typically encounter sets of natural numbers and sets of real numbers in their maths curriculum. …

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The Case for Illegal Immigration

On 4th February Donald Trump delivered what may be his last State of the Union. He is facing a tough election later in the year and it comes as no surprise that his address was chock full of themes to get his base frothing at the mouth, among which was illegal immigration.…

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Ever New and Increasing Awe

From our perspective, life seems meaningful—and not just full of personally meaningful things, like having children or playing Bach perfectly. Most of us live our lives as if there is an answer to the callings of our deepest soul longings. We live as if what we do matters in some sort of cosmic way. Human life feels as though it has purpose and function and meaning.

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Why Revisit the Early Modern Canon?

The thing about canons is that they seem sacred. Challenging them, even revisiting them, can seem heretical. Facing these facts is the first step in addressing the intransigence of the early modern philosophical canon. Step two involves noticing just how much the canon leaves out.

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Journal of the APA receives PROSE Award

The American Philosophical Association and Cambridge University Press are pleased to announce that the Journal of the American Philosophical Association has been selected as the winner of the 2017 PROSE Award for the Best New Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences.…

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