Via Crooked Timber, photographer Steve Pyke has a portrait gallery of some of the most eminent philosophers of the late 20th century, and a sequel containing some more recent shots. They’re fantastic images, and many have short summaries of the subject’s central projects in his or her own words.

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Wired has a generally pretty fun sort of gee-whiz cover feature on the “big questions” remaining for science. But the section on the question of how the brain gives rise to the conscious mind is just endlessly irritating. The author closes thus: Some philosophers still argue that consciousness is too subjective to explain, or that […]

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One response to my post the other day on free will (or the nonexistence thereof) seems like a good illustration of a phenomenon I think I’ve noted in this space before, which I call “the shadow of faith”: It is the vehement assertion that there is no God, coupled with a vague worry that you […]

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In opening scene of The Wire‘s season finale, we see a bit of graffiti in the police department bathroom that reads (referring to the deputy of operations) “Rawls sucks cock.” Sigrid Fry-Revere offers a similar assessment in less crude language in a pair of posts over at Cato-at-Liberty, the first of which is titled “Why […]

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As he correctly surmises, I knew my friend Steve Maloney, a Hannah Arendt scholar, would flip out over a stunningly vacuous hit piece on everyone’s favorite theorist of totalitarianism. I kind of tuned out after the reference to the “last great political American philosopher, John Dewey,” but Steve has a witty post exposing the Banality […]

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Remember logical positivism? If you weren’t a philosophy major in college, quite probably you don’t, since it cropped up around the time of the first World War, and was pretty much dead by the second. It was an anti-metaphysical school of philosophy that sought to pare down the proper domain of rationally meaningful propositions to […]

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I’ve been thumbing through Richard Dawkins’ slightly curmudgeonly but generally interesting new book The God Delusion, which doesn’t add a great deal that’s new to the debate over theism (is there anything new to add?) but is, at any rate, a nice roundup of the relevant arguments, even if the tone makes me skeptical of […]

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The call I put out a few days ago for help with my nacent Robert Nozick project has already yielded one very interesting contribution: My friend Abe Sutherland was able to pass along copies of the moving remarks delivered by some of Nozick’s family, friends, and colleagues at his memorial service in March of 2002. […]

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I was a bit surprised to read Majikthise’s reaction to an odd hypothetical from Kevin Drum: With this in mind, here’s another possibility for what happens after we create fantastically advanced computing capabilities that are thoroughly merged with human consciousness: we discover — in a way that’s truly convincing — that free will doesn’t exist. […]

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