By: John Priest,
on 10/16/2016
This October, the OUP Philosophy team honors al-Kindī (c. 800-870) as their Philosopher of the Month. Known as the “first philosopher of the Arabs,” al-Kindī was one of the most important mathematicians, physicians, astronomers and philosophers of his time.
The post How much do you know about al‐Kindī? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: RachelM,
on 10/16/2016
Before looking at the person-less variant of the Bernedete paradox, lets review the original: Imagine that Alice is walking towards a point – call it A – and will continue walking past A unless something prevents her from progressing further.
The post A person-less variant of the Bernadete paradox appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Franca Driessen,
on 10/15/2016
Between 1986 and 1988, the jazz musician and experimental music pioneer George Lewis created the first version of Voyager. After spending some time making work that involved compositional programmes in Paris, Lewis returned to the US and began work on Voyager. His aspiration was not simply to use computers as a tool or raw material, but to create software that could take an equal improvisational role to the other (human) musicians in the performance.
The post Art in the age of digital production appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 10/9/2016
From the publication of the Origin, Darwin enthusiasts have been building a kind of secular religion based on its ideas, particularly on the dark world without ultimate meaning implied by the central mechanism of natural selection.
The post Darwinism as religion: what literature tells us about evolution appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 10/8/2016
Insults have lately been making headline news. Last year, the world witnessed an attack on the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
The post How would the ancient Stoics have dealt with hate speech? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: RachelM,
on 10/2/2016
In a candid interview with Stephen Colbert, Vice President Joe Biden gave a moving testimony about his faith amid the pain of recently losing his son to brain cancer. In the past, both Colbert and Biden have been open about their Catholic faith, but in this moment both men found themselves reflecting upon how they have struggled with their faith after losing loved ones very close to them.
The post Seeing in the dark: Catholic theology and Søren Kierkegaard appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 10/2/2016
Regius was a professor of medicine at the University of Utrecht. He was much taken with the views he had read in the scientific essays accompanying Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637), and was one of the first to introduce Descartes’s new mechanistic account of the material world into the Dutch academy.
The post Cartesian plasticity: The curious case of Henricus Regius appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 10/1/2016
Known as the “first philosopher of the Arabs,” al-Kindī was one of the most important mathematicians, physicians, astronomers and philosophers of his time. He composed hundreds of treatises, using many of the tools of Greek philosophy to address themes in Islamic thought.
The post Philosopher of the month: al-Kindī appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Franca Driessen,
on 9/25/2016
Are you taking any philosophy courses as part of your degree this year? Or are you continuing with a second degree in philosophy? Then look no further for the best in philosophy research. We’ve brought together some of our most popular textbooks to help you prepare for the new academic year. From Plato to Descartes, ancient wisdom to modern philosophical issues, this list provides a great first stop for under-graduate and post-graduate students alike.
The post Back to philosophy: A reading list appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Franca Driessen,
on 9/24/2016
Alexius Meinong (1853-1920) was an Austrian psychologist and systematic philosopher working in Graz around the turn of the 20th century. Part of his work was to put forward a sophisticated analysis of the content of thought. A notable aspect of this was as follows. If you are thinking of the Taj Mahal, you are thinking of something, and that something exists.
The post The strange case of the missing non-existent objects appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 9/21/2016
I’m no expert. Still, I reckon the notorious claim made by Michael Gove, a leading campaigner for Britain to leave the European Union, that the nation had had enough of experts, will dog him for the rest of his career. In fact, he wasn’t alone. Other Brexit leaders also sneered at the pretensions of experts, the majority of whom warned about the risks – political, economic, social - of a Britain outside the EU.
The post In defence of moral experts appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 9/19/2016
Among the world’s most widely studied thinkers, Aristotle established systematic logic and helped to progress scientific investigation in fields as diverse as biology and political theory. But how much do you really know about this ancient philosopher?
The post How well do you know Aristotle? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Celine Aenlle-Rocha,
on 9/18/2016
At the home of the world’s most authoritative dictionary, perhaps it is not inappropriate to play a word association game. If I say the word ‘modern’, what comes into your mind? The chances are, it will be some variation of ‘new’, ‘recent’, or ‘contemporary’.
The post The old age of the world appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Franca Driessen,
on 9/18/2016
Let us say that a sentence is periphrastic if and only if there is a single word in that sentence such that we can remove the word and the result (i) is grammatical, and (ii) has the same truth value as the original sentence.
The post Periphrastic puzzles appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Franca Driessen,
on 9/17/2016
In his long-awaited report on the circumstances surrounding the United Kingdom’s decision to join forces with the United States and invade Iraq in 2003, Sir John Chilcot lists a number of failings on the part of the then-British leadership.
The post Moral responsibilities when waging war appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Celine Aenlle-Rocha,
on 9/15/2016
Throughout his career, J. M Coetzee has been centrally preoccupied with how to tell the truth of an individual life, most of all, how to find the appropriate narrator and fictional genre. Many of his fifteen novels disclose first person narrators in a confessional mode, and so it is not altogether surprising that his latest book is a dialogue with a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, in which they explore together notions of selfhood, repression, disclosure and the nature of communication.
The post Coetzee’s Dialogues: Who says who we are? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Franca Driessen,
on 9/11/2016
Just because everyone is on Twitter doesn’t mean they’ve all got interesting things to say. I vaguely recall reading that late 19th-century curmudgeons expressed similar scepticism about the then much-hyped technology of the telephone.
The post Just because all philosophers are on Twitter… appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 9/10/2016
The traditional view puts forward the idea that the vast majority of what there is in the universe is mindless. Panpsychism however claims that mental features are ubiquitous in the cosmos.
The post Is the mind just an accident of the universe? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 9/9/2016
At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, national states were on the rise. Versailles was constructed as a stage on which the Sun King, Louis XIV, acted out the pageant of absolute sovereignty while his armies annexed neighbouring territories for the greater glory of France. At the death of Charles II of Spain in November 1700, the Spanish throne and its extensive possessions in Italy, the Low Countries and the New World passed to his grandson, Philip, Duke of Anjou.
The post Leibniz and Europe appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Matt Phelan,
on 9/8/2016
By: John Priest,
on 9/4/2016
Among the world’s most widely studied thinkers, Aristotle established systematic logic and helped to progress scientific investigation in fields as diverse as biology and political theory. His thought became dominant during the medieval period in both the Islamic and the Christian worlds, and has continued to play an important role in fields such as philosophical psychology, aesthetics, and rhetoric.
The post Philosopher of the month: Aristotle appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Lisa Kramer,
on 9/3/2016
Jane Addams is perhaps best known as Hull House activist, recipient of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, and forbearer of modern social work, as well as being a founding member of both the NAACP and the ACLU. Underappreciated, however, is her central role in the development of American Pragmatism and contemporary social inquiry methodology. Until the 1990s, feminist philosophers and historians began working to recover her role in the development of pragmatist thought.
The post What academia owes Jane Addams appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Estefania Ospina,
on 8/31/2016
There has lately been something like an arms race in literary studies to name whatever comes after postmodernism. Post-postmodernism, cosmodernism, digimodernism, automodernism, altermodernism, and metamodernism rank among the more popular prospects.
The post The last -ism? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 8/28/2016
What importance do the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean have for us? This question has been answered in different ways over the centuries, but for a long time the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome have been attractive as a baseline and a model, be it in economic, aesthetic, cultural, military, or political terms.
The post The origins of political order appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 8/28/2016
If you asked many people today, they would say that one of the limitations of analytic philosophy is its narrowness. Whereas in previous centuries philosophers took on projects of broad scope, today’s philosophers typically deal with smaller issues.
The post Against narrowness in philosophy appeared first on OUPblog.
