For the past four or five months I have been subscribed to a few RSS feeds serving me academic philosophy content. I wasn’t really aware that this sort of thing existed before so I am pleased to be learning a great deal. Here are some good things I’ve read recently.
Corigliano d’Otranto thinks it is Italy’s most philosophical town, therefore it is
Things to Tell a Therapist at the First Appointment
Lee Braver interviewed by Richard Marshall
Jonardon Ganeri interviewed by Richard Marshall
This is the general pattern I think we can find in both Europe and India. The way that history of philosophy gets taught even today still seems to me to be a hangover from the nineteenth century, when there was a strong political imperative to tell a story about the seventeenth century that displayed it as exhibiting European exceptionalism, and the self-depictions of Descartes and Bacon were useful ammunition in that, now outdated, enterprise. Unfortunately university curricula have been slow to catch up and what I regard as basically nineteenth century mythology still works to shape the way that history of philosophy is taught in Europe.
Richard Brown interviewed by Richard Marshall
I think philosophers should think of our job as canvassing the theoretical landscape. We want to know every possible permutation and every possible interrelation between every possible theory. We can think of philosophers as a kind of explorers of logical space. We have been working on this grand unified map of possibilities for some time now and this constitutes progress in philosophy, at least of a sort. If so then it doesn’t really matter who is right about how things actually are, what matters is exploring logical space.
Don’t Confuse Technology With College Teaching
Sarah Sawyer interviewed by Richard Marshall
Scott Berman interviewed by Richard Marshall
In particular look at the interviewee’s response to this question:
3:AM: Some contemporary physicists have recently been grumpy about philosophy and said they can answer the philosophical questions without them. So why should we take notice of philosophers like yourself?