metaphilosophy
TagArticle Spotlight: “The End of History” by Hanno Sauer
Daily Nous is launching a new series, Article Spotlight, in which the authors of recent journal articles are invited to write brief posts here about them.
Analytic Philosophy and the Big Questions of Life
At the start of each term, Helena de Bres (Wellesley) holds “get to know you” office hours with her students. “So what made you sign up for a philosophy class?” she asks. (more…)
To Be a Department of Philosophy (guest post)
“There are many reasons to expand the story we tell about philosophy. But a main reason is just that the best, most interesting, and even the correct answers to philosophical questions that interest us might be found anywhere.” (more…)
The Contingency of Philosophers’ Philosophies
In an interview, Josef Mitterer is asked about how approaches to philosophy may vary by whether they provide “an escape from contingency.” (more…)
“The Way Philosophy Is Personal”
Wittgenstein’s early private notebooks have just been published in English, translated by Marjorie Perloff (Stanford). Towards the end of an essay about them, Kieran Setiya (MIT) draws attention to “the way philosophy is personal.” (more…)
Philosophers, Concepts, and Cognitive Biases
“We found some evidence of differences in conceptual competence between philosophers and laypeople, and documented a difference in linguistic diet; but these differences did not translate into different susceptibility to even the most pertinent cognitive bias, or render philosophers’ judgments appreciably more accurate.” (more…)
Creativity and Pluralism in Philosophy
“Philosophy at its best is a kind of intellectual exploration, and the more methodological and stylistic constraints are placed on it, the less well it will function as such.” (more…)
Which Questions Can’t Philosophy Answer By Itself?
In an interview in The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia, Thomas Spiteri asks Peter Godfrey-Smith (Sydney) about “how best to make epistemic progress” answering philosophical questions about minds and consciousness. (more…)
Increased Specialization & Competent Peer Review
Is increased specialization in philosophy a problem for high-quality peer review? (more…)
Philosophy that “Tries to Get You to See Something”
At the beginning of his interviews of philosophers, Richard Marshall asks his subjects, “What made you become a philosopher?” (more…)
“Very often, corralling is not an option in philosophy”
That’s philosopher Frank Jackson (ANU), in a recent interview published in The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia. (more…)
In Defense of the Details (guest post)
Are today’s younger philosophers “focusing too much on detailed investigations of individual things and not enough on the big picture”? (more…)
World Philosophy Day & the Growth of Philosophy
Today is World Philosophy Day, a day designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to celebrate “the enduring value of philosophy for the development of human thought, for each culture and for each individual.” (more…)
An Empirical Approach to the Analytic-Continental Divide
What’s the difference between analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy? In a new paper, a pair of researchers use a computer analysis of the content of different journals to test one way the distinction is sometimes characterized. (more…)
Evidence for a Probabilistic Turn in Philosophy (guest post)
“If our data is representative of the philosophy literature, then the use of formal methods in philosophy changed starkly over the course of just a single decade.” (more…)
Shaping the AI Revolution In Philosophy (guest post)
“Despite the great promise of AI, we maintain that unless philosophers theorize about and help develop philosophy-specific AI, it is likely that AI will not be as philosophically useful.” (more…)
Optimism about Metaphysics (and Philosophy in General)
Is there reason to be optimistic about progress in metaphysics? Jessica Wilson (Toronto) thinks so. (more…)
Intuitive Expertise in Moral Judgments (guest post)
“People’s intuitive judgments about thought experiment cases are influenced by all kinds of irrelevant factors… the issue of intuitive expertise in moral philosophy is anything but settled.”
Analytic Philosophy’s “Triple Failure of Confidence”
“Analytic philosophy suffers from a triple failure of confidence, especially among younger philosophers.” (more…)
“Hey Sophi”, or How Much Philosophy Will Computers Do?
While we have seen increased use of computing in philosophy over the past two decades, the continued development of computational sophistication and power, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and associated technologies, suggest that philosophers in the near future could do more philosophy through computers, or outsource various philosophical tasks to compute..
Philosophical Quality Now and Then
“I find no good reason to think that philosophers today do philosophy better than philosophers 600 or 2000 years ago.” (more…)
2020 PhilPapers Survey Begins
In 2009, the PhilPapers team—David Bourget of the University of Western Ontario and David Chalmers of New York University—conducted a survey of the views of professional philosophers in the English-speaking world. How have those views changed in the past 11 years? (more…)
Computer Simulation as “Core Philosophical Method”
“Modeling and computer simulations, we claim, should be considered core philosophical methods.” (more…)
Philosophical Intuitions Are Surprisingly Stable (guest post by Joshua Knobe)
There seems to be a very general pattern whereby the tensions in people’s intuitions tend to be surprisingly stable across both demographic groups and situations. (more…)
Toward a More Expansive Conception of Philosophy (guest post by Angela Potochnik)
To whom are we as philosophers speaking and responding; whom do we judge as being worthy of dialogue and, hopefully, our intellectual contributions? (more…)
No Escape from Metaphysics
I think the contemporary scene is thriving. But you still run into critics of metaphysics. I find these critics genuinely puzzling. Let me try to explain why. (more…)
To Identify as a Philosopher and ‘Insane’
To identify as a philosopher and “insane” isn’t quite oxymoronic, but it is certainly something that I didn’t want to risk until very recently. (more…)
The Margins of Philosophy (guest post by Peter Adamson)
“We need to understand the ‘minor figures’ to understand the ‘major figures’ adequately. But that’s not the only reason to be interested in minor figures, or to bring them to the attention of a wider audience. There is also the fact that apparently minor figures are sometimes major figures.” (more…)