Participants and Spectators

by Robert Pippin
University of Chicago

I

There remains great controversy in philosophy over the issue of how we should make sense of what people do, of their actions, as opposed to explaining what happens to them. Some philosophers believe that if the question is: what distinguishes naturally occurring events like bodily movements in space from metaphysically distinct

Continue reading Participants and Spectators

April 19th, 2010 | 38 comments | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Category: Participants, current controversies, humans

Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement: Developing an Argument from Nietzsche

by Brian Leiter

By “moral skepticism,” I shall mean the view that there are no objective moral ‘facts’ or ‘truths.’  Moral skeptics from Friedrich Nietzsche to Charles Stevenson to John Mackie have appealed to the purported fact of widespread and intractable moral disagreement to support the skeptical conclusion. Typically, such arguments invoke anthropological reports about the

Continue reading Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement: Developing an Argument from Nietzsche

March 25th, 2010 | 32 comments | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Category: Participants, current controversies, humans

Humans and Humanists (and Scientists)

by Harriet Ritvo

Although humanism itself has often been controversial, until recently there has been a fair amount of consensus about the denotation of “human” among practitioners and critics.  This consensus has been notably durable.  In the Oxford English Dictionary, the first three senses of “human” distinguish “mankind” from animals, from “mere objects or events,” and

Continue reading Humans and Humanists (and Scientists)

March 14th, 2010 | 8 comments | Tags: , , , , | Category: Participants, current controversies, humans

Science and the Humanities

by Michael Allen Gillespie

At odd moments, often when I’m distracted, it occurs to me that a song or a piece of music has been repeatedly running through my head. It’s an experience nearly everyone has. Sometimes it’s invigorating to realize that you have been striding through the day to the chords of Beethoven, but it’s

Continue reading Science and the Humanities

January 18th, 2010 | 25 comments | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Category: Participants, humans