Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

Frowe Wins Sanders Prize in Political Philosophy

24. September 2019 Philosophy News News
Helen Frowe, professor of philosophy at Stockholm University and director of the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace, has won the 2019 Sanders Prize in Political Philosophy. The prize is awarded by the Marc Sanders Foundation and is based on a competition of essays of “original research on central issues in political or social philosophy, such as moral issues relating to the state or the justification of force, authority, obligation, justice, freedom, rights, exploitation, oppression, etc.” It includes $5,000 and publication in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Professor Frowe won the prize for her essay, “The Duty to Save and the Duty to Minimise Harm.” Here’s the abstract: This paper defends the Limited Use View of our duties to save. This view holds that a claim to be saved is a claim to make use of another person (and her resources) for one’s own sake. But we have only limited claims to make use of others and their resources. We are not entitled to make use of others when doing so is either unreasonably costly for them or conflicts with their duties to others. Hence, our claims to be saved are limited. By the same token, our duties to save are also limited. We need not save when doing so is unreasonably costly for us or conflicts with our duties to others, since others have no claim to make use of us when doing so is unreasonably costly for us or conflicts with our duties to others. One upshot of the Limited Use View is that it can [More]
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New AOS: Public Philosophy & Prison Education

24. September 2019 Philosophy News News
Marymount Manhattan College is looking to hire someone with expertise in both public philosophy and prison education, neither of which have been listed as areas of specialization in a philosophy job ad before, to my knowledge.  (Correct me if I’m wrong about that.) The job is a two-to-three year visiting joint appointment as a fellow at the College’s Geraldine A. Ferraro Institute for Breakthrough Civic Leadership and its Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies. The chief responsibilities of the position include teaching courses on public philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, and related topics, teaching courses in the school’s prison education programs, developing and overseeing the programs, providing professional development opportunities for other faculty teaching in them, and helping the department revise its philosophy major to have a focus on public philosophy. You can check out the ad here. (via Thi Nguyen) The post New AOS: Public Philosophy & Prison Education appeared first on Daily [More]
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Qualia: The Knowledge Argument

23. September 2019 Philosophy News News
[Revised entry by Martine Nida-Rümelin and Donnchadh O Conaill on September 23, 2019. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] The knowledge argument aims to establish that conscious experience involves non-physical properties. It rests on the idea that someone who has complete physical knowledge about another conscious being might yet lack knowledge about how it feels to have the experiences of that being. It is one of the most discussed arguments against [More]
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Happiness

23. September 2019 Philosophy News News
[Revised entry by Dan Haybron on September 23, 2019. Changes to: Bibliography] There are roughly two philosophical literatures on "happiness," each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses 'happiness' as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to 'depression' or 'tranquility'. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on [More]
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Myles Burnyeat (1939-2019)

23. September 2019 Philosophy News News
Miles Burnyeat, emeritus fellow at Oxford University’s All Souls College and emeritus professor of philosophy at Cambridge University’s Robinson College, has died.   Professor Burnyeat was well-known for his work in ancient philosophy. In a speech honoring him in 2012, Sarah Broadie (St. Andrews) said: In classical studies, especially in the study of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, Myles Burnyeat’s name is a byword for extraordinary humanistic achievement. Students of ancient thought at every level and in many countries are beholden to his example, in teaching as in research. His expertise ranges wide and deep over material stretching from the pre-Socratic philosophers, to the great classical and Hellenistic figures, and on through a vast cavalcade of successors into late antiquity. Our grasp and appreciation of just about every shape and movement of thought in this thousand year sweep of philosophy has been informed, invigorated, and in some cases seriously corrected by Myles Burnyeat’s work. Professor Burnyeat was an undergraduate at Cambridge University and a graduate student at University College London (under the supervision of Bernard Williams). His first teaching appointment was at UCL, in 1964. In 1978 he took up an appointment at Cambridge, and then in 1996 he became a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of many works, including The Theaetetus of Plato, A Map of Metaphysics Zeta, Aristotle’s Divine Intellect, and The Original [More]
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