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Janet Malcolm, whose literary reportage evinced an unsparing and precise gaze on the world, is dead. She was 86 ... NYTimes ... WaPo .. The New Yorker ... Guardian ... New Republic ... Ian Frazer ... Laura Marsh ... Leo Robson 

19. June 2021 Philosophy News News
Janet Malcolm, whose literary reportage evinced an unsparing and precise gaze on the world, is dead. She was 86 ... NYTimes ... WaPo .. The New Yorker ... Guardian ... New Republic ... Ian Frazer ... Laura Marsh ... Leo [More]
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Juneteenth

18. June 2021 Philosophy News News
As many Republican controlled states rush to “cancel” critical race theory, Juneteenth became a federal holiday. While the Emancipation Proclamation outlawed slavery in the South in 1862 (going into effect in 1863), it was not until June 19, 1865 that Union Army general Gordon Granger announced General Order No. 3. This order proclaimed freedom for [More]
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Wilfrid Sellars and Twentieth-Century Philosophy

18. June 2021 Philosophy News News
2021.06.02 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Stefan Brandt and Anke Breunig (eds.), Wilfrid Sellars and Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Routledge, 2020, 245pp., $160.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780815384991. Reviewed by Luca Corti, University of Padua The sheer number of studies on Wilfrid Sellars that have mushroomed in recent years are an unequivocal sign that he has acquired canonic status in contemporary debates (cf. Seiberth forthcoming, Garfield 2018, Koons 2018, Corti-Nunziante 2018, Pereplyotchik and Barnbaum 2017, Gironi 2017, O'Shea 2016, Reider 2016, Olen 2016). Despite this uptick in interest, however, the terrain is still fertile for innovative work, and this volume, edited by Stefan Brandt and Anke Breunig, makes an important contribution in mapping the terrain and exploring Sellars' "historical role in twentieth century philosophy" (2). This evaluation unfolds through three overlapping conceptual lines: Part I tracks a set of influences on Sellars' thought and illuminates the origin of some of his views; Part II explores Sellars' position in... Read [More]
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Facing Up to Scarcity: The Logic and Limits of Nonconsequentialist Thought

16. June 2021 Philosophy News News
2021.06.01 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Barbara H. Fried, Facing Up to Scarcity: The Logic and Limits of Nonconsequentialist Thought, Oxford University Press, 2020, 269pp., $70.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198847878. Reviewed by Peter Vallentyne, University of Missouri Barbara H. Fried (a law professor at Stanford) has published extensively on theories of distributive justice. This book consists of revised versions of ten previously published articles (1995-2020) plus three new chapters. The main focus is on presenting arguments against the following: (1) attaching much moral significance to highly simplified thought experiments (e.g., trolley problems), (2) John Rawls' contractualist account of justice, especially his appeal to maximin/leximin reasoning behind the veil of ignorance, (3) T.M. Scanlon's contractualist account of moral permissibility, (4) social (i.e., Hobbesian or quasi-libertarian) contractarian accounts of moral permissibility or justice, (5) Robert Nozick's right-libertarian theory, and (6) left-libertarianism. These critiques are largely internal in that they accept the core commitments of the view addressed and argue either that those... Read [More]
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