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66Beyond the hoaxerThe Philosophers' Magazine 41 121-126. 2008.I’m not trying to be strategic. I’m not a politician. I’m a physicist, an academic, and, if you want, an amateur philosopher. I’m trying to say what I think is true as clearly and unemotionally as I can, and leave it to people to judge if my arguments are right or wrong.
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81Anglo-Saxon reserveThe Philosophers' Magazine 43 (43): 60-66. 2008.There’s not only indifference, there’s actually a huge sense of sneering superiority. The need for intercultural understanding and global dialogue between different philosophical traditions and philosophical countries is so important. It’s just crazy to think that in your own monoglot culture you’ve got all the essential tools that you need to do philosophy.
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7The Ethics Toolkit: A Compendium of Ethical Concepts and MethodsWiley-Blackwell. 2008._The Ethics Toolkit_ provides an accessible and engaging compendium of concepts, theories, and strategies that encourage students and advanced readers to think critically about ethics so that they can engage intelligently in ethical study, thought, and debate. Written by the authors of the popular _The Philosophers’ Toolkit_ (Blackwell, 2001); Baggini is also a renowned print and broadcast journalist, and a prolific author of popular philosophy books Uses clear and accessible language appropriat…Read more
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6Nicholas Rescher, Philosophical Reasoning: A study in the methodology of philosophizing Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 22 (5): 361-363. 2002.
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83The austere optimistThe Philosophers' Magazine 47 25-33. 2009.If you’re thinking ethically you ought to try to take the point of view from which you consider whether you could prescribe the action if you were in the position of all of those affected by it. I think that if you consider the situation of poverty and affluence, if you were really to put yourself in the position of the poor person and the affluent person, and ask yourself whether you could support the view that the affluent person doesn’t give anything to the poor, you couldn’t.
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127Morality as a rational requirementPhilosophy 77 (3): 447-453. 2002.John Searle has recently produced an argument for strong altruism which rests on the recognition that ‘I believe my need for help is a reason for you to help me’. The argument fails to recognize the difference between ‘a reason for me for you to help me’ and ‘a reason for you for you to help me.’ These are two logically distinct types of reason and the existence of one can never therefore be enough to establish the existence of the other. The existence of this logical gap is a major obstacle for…Read more
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107The populist threat to pluralismPhilosophy and Social Criticism 41 (4-5): 403-412. 2015.Although political pluralism can have an ethical justification, it does not need one. Political pluralism can be justified on the basis of an epistemological argument about what we can claim to know, one which has a normative conclusion about how strongly we ought to believe. This is important because for pluralism to command wide assent, it needs something other than an ethical justification, since many simply will not accept that justification. Thus understood, we can see that current threats …Read more
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280Brainy brawlersThe Philosophers' Magazine 35 (35): 66-69. 2006.“It’s not good enough to say there’s some mechanism such that you start out with amoebas and you end up with us. Everybody agrees with that. The question is in this case in the mechanical details. What you need is an account, as it were step by step, about what the constraints are, what the environmental variables are, and Darwin doesn’t give you that.”
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73The problem of pluralismThe Philosophers' Magazine 43 (43): 72-77. 2008.One does not need to hold that western philosophy, or some subset of it, is superior to other kinds in order to worry about whether different strands of philosophy can meaningfully engage in dialogue together. Nor do these worries necessarily entail any arrogance. We can always learn form others, but that does not mean we should not prioritise some encounters over others.
Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
| Philosophy, Introductions and Anthologies |
| Philosophy, General Works |