What is philosophy?
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Habermas and the Israeli mass killings in Gaza
As is well-known, Habermas and others issued a statement of “solidarity” with Israel about a month after the October 7 atrocities by Hamas. This was, no doubt, borne of his long efforts to resist any attempts to whitewash the Nazi atrocities, which brought the state of Israel into being. And a month after the October…
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What is analytic philosophy?
I came across this chart on FB, and it’s not a bad description of analytic philosophy when it existed (except, of course, the image next to Kripke is not Kripke!):
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The persistent myth that Williams was significantly influenced by Nietzsche
(Moving to front from yesterday–file link fixed) I usually like Jane O’Grady’s work, but this popular piece is quite misleading. There are some superficial similarities between Williams and Nietzsche, but the differences are far more profound, including in their completely different understanding of the Greeks. Williams’s critique of morality is also quite tepid by comparison…
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Consciousness, computation, and animal minds
Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses.
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Nietzsche on Plato
From The Twilight of the Idols (“What I Owe to the Ancients,” section 2): I am a complete skeptic about Plato….In the end, my distrust of Plato goes deep: he represents such an aberration from all the basic instinct of the Hellene, is so moralistic, so pre-existently Christian–he already takes the concept “good” for the…
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Leo Strauss was mostly a charlatan, redux
Longtime readers will know that there are three characters who get called “philosophers” that I really think are a disgrace: Jacques Derrida, Ayn Rand, and Leo Strauss. They each have acolytes, who hate me for saying out loud what any serious scholar or philosopher knows. Rand is most obviously an ignorant buffoon, but Derrida and…
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Thomasson redux
A propos this, here’s a much friendlier (and more informative) review by Huw Price, a “fellow traveller,” as it were.
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Habermas on the “Axial age”
I was intrigued by this review by Andrew Buchwalter of volume 3 of Habermas’s huge history of philosophy. In particular, I was struck by Professor Buchwalter’s description of Habermas’s discussion of the so-called “Axial Age”: Occurring in the period between 800 and 200 BCE, the Axial Age reflected the ascendance of the major world religions,…
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Frithjof Bergmann and “New Work”
When I was applying to PhD programs as an undergraduate at Princeton, with an interest in German philosophy, especially Nietzsche, my very kind senior thesis advisor T.M. Scanlon told me that the late Walter Kaufmann’s favorite student was Frithjof Bergmann at Michigan. Raymond Geuss, from whom I was taking a course on “Marx, Nietzsche, Freud,”…
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Jonathan Lear’s final interview
Here. He does an especially nice job explaining the connection between psychoanalysis and his interest in Greek philosophy. But the whole thing is worth reading.
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Jason Brennan *did* like Herman Cappelen’s book
It’s both an informative and amusing review. An excerpt: Herman Cappelen’s densely argued but eminently readable and engaging The Concept of Democracy…argues that the words “democracy” and “democratic” (what he calls the “D-words”) are so semantically, pragmatically, and communicatively defective that we should abandon them altogether. His book is not an argument against democracy but an…
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It turns out Christoph Schuringa knows very little about the “social” history of analytic philosophy
Peter Ludlow’s analysis is quite devastating. I’m surprised other reviewers didn’t pick up on these remarkable mistakes and omissions. UPDATE: A couple of readers sent this review by Pascal Engel, which I had not seen, and which makes points related to those discussed by Ludlow. (I should add that I do think much “analytic” philosophy…
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Johnathan Bi interviews Axel Honneth…
…about the need for recognition.
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Williamson vs. Thomasson
Philosopher Amie Thomasson is a leading figure in “deflationary” and neo-pragmatist approaches to metaphysics and ontology, along with other philosophers like Huw Price, Jenann Ismael, Matthieu Queloz, Jose Zalabardo, Cheryl Misak, and Michael Williams. (This is a useful and illustrative collection.) Timothy Williamson, by contrast, is a stalwart friend of “inflationary” metaphysics. Unsurprisingly, he did…
Porphyry of Tyre on Theology and Theurgy (Harvard University Press & Center for the Study of World Religions, 2026) Permanently…