Tag Archives: philosophy

Karl Ameriks, RIP

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries

I wanted to note the passing of Karl Ameriks (1947-2025), the Emeritus McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. He died yesterday in South Bend, Indiana at the age of 77.

I didn’t know Ameriks particularly well. My first memory was a conversation I had with him in 1991 about what little I knew about Kant’s first Critique. I’d taken an undergraduate course on Kant with Wolfgang Carl, the eminent Kant scholar, and was flattered to learn that Ameriks was interested in my lecture notes. He read them, thanked me for them, but never commented on them. I think he found them more amusing than anything else. Continue reading →

Engels on Social Murder

Posted on by under Health Care Series, liberty and the left

“Social murder” is a form of homicide that takes place through relatively invisible social processes involving collective rather than individual responsibility. The concept is controversial because it attributes murder to “society” while relying on an unconventional conception of murder: society intends murder, and society kills, where society is identified with a ruling class that controls the political system. What’s controversial here is that social murder kills mostly by omission rather than commission, and is perpetrated by a class rather than by individuals. Both assumptions flout the conventional understanding of the intentionality and causality of murder. Continue reading →

Understanding Rightwing vs. Leftwing

Posted on by under libertarianism, political philosophy

I have spent my whole adult life as a libertarian or classical liberal of one kind or another. And throughout this long period—for I am not young—I have been puzzled as to whether I should think of myself as leftwing or rightwing or centrist, or whether I should, like many libertarians, reject the conventional left–right political spectrum altogether. So now, herewith I propose to try to sort this out.

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First Thoughts on Pettit’s Republicanism

Posted on by under ethics, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism

I want to get some basic thoughts on Philip Pettit’s book, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, on the record. Pettit’s ideas have the virtue of being not so far out in left field (from my own perspective) as to be hopeless, yet strange enough to be difficult to grapple with. What follows really are just some first thoughts, not very elegantly expressed, and not very certain.

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Stephen Nathanson (1943-2023), RIP

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries

I read the other day of the recent death of Stephen Nathanson, professor emeritus of philosophy at Northeastern University. I didn’t know Nathanson very well–we never met–but nonetheless wanted to note his passing. 

I first encountered Nathanson’s work when I did manuscript reviews for Prentice Hall Press back in the mid-1990s. The Press assigned me a manuscript of his to review with the working title Who Gets What?, later called Economic Justice and published in their Foundations of Philosophy Series (1998). It’s a refreshingly well-written and clarifying book. When I first read the manuscript, I held a Rand-and-Nozick-influenced version of libertarianism at odds with the defense of the welfare state Nathanson offers in Economic Justice. It took me awhile, but I eventually came around to something like the view Nathanson defends, and did so partly by reflection on his arguments. I still turn to the book decades after the fact when I want to think things through on the subject. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s looking to do the same. Continue reading →

“Cities After COVID”

Posted on by under General announcements

For your interest: a mini-symposium on “Cities After COVID” in TPM: The Philosophers’ Magazine. Yours truly has a bite-sized contribution about two-thirds of the way down, “The Pedestrian Death Crisis at the Intersection”: hyper-applied philosophy offered pro bono publicum. Thanks to Ian Olasov for putting the symposium together, and to everyone who’s had to endure the traffic/pedestrian safety rants that led to my essay. But don’t stop at that particular intersection; drive through and check out the whole thing.

Curious Soul Workshop on Alienation

Posted on by under General announcements

My friend Monica Vilhauer, founder and owner of Curious Soul Philosophy, an independent philosophy organization, is running a series of workshops this fall on alienation. I’d attend myself, but I’m on a bit of a hiatus from things nowadays, so I can’t. That said, I would if I could, so I highly recommend giving it a shot: I can vouch, personally, for Monica’s acumen and skills as a philosophical interlocutor. Whether you want to re-live your long-lost glory days in grad school, or just figure out why alienation seems to be a ubiquitous fixture of our lives–or both–I think you’ll get more than your money’s worth. Information below, and via this this link to Monica’s website.

Even if you happen to miss this particular workshop, take a look around at CSP’s other offerings–there’s a bit of something for everyone. Incidentally, I asked Monica if she’d consider doing a workshop on Gadamer (her AOS, and the subject of her book, Gadamer’s Ethics of Play), and she said she would if I could get a handful of people to sign on with me. In other words, For a fee/She’s happy to be/Our Gadamer Girl. That’s where you guys come in, PoT heads. So get your truth and method on, and let’s take a ride down Continental Lane one of these days (but yeah, you’re going to have to wait until I’m back from my Exile in Hiatusville). Continue reading →

The End of History (for Physics)?

Posted on by under Uncategorized

In a trio of blog posts from 2010 (see here, here, and here), Sean Carroll defends the striking claim that, as far as concerns the basic physical principles that underlie the phenomena of everyday life, physics has been completed.

[T]here’s no question that the human goal of figuring out the basic rules by which the easily observable world works was one that was achieved once and for all in the twentieth century.

That’s right: “once and for all.” If asked for the basic, underlying story about why a table is solid or why the sun shines or what happens when a person flexes a muscle, modern science gives its answers in terms of “the particles of the Standard Model, interacting through electromagnetism, gravity, and the nuclear forces, according to the principles of quantum mechanics and general relativity.” One hundred years ago, explanations by this story (i.e., body of theory) could not be given, because this story did not exist. “But—here’s the important part—one thousand years from now, you will hear precisely that same story.”

I think Carroll is right, and I think the philosophy of structural realism can help to illuminate why. The purpose of what follows is to explain these points.

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