Philosophy’s Language Problem Louise Chapman, Filippo Contesi, and Constantine Sandis Philosophy has a language problem. A recent study by Schwitzgebel, Huang, Higgins and Gonzalez-Cabrera(2018) found that, in a sample of papers published in elite journals, 97% of citations were to work originally written in English. 73% of this same sample didn’t cite any paper that had been originally written in…

Constantine Sandis Moral particularism is often defined as the view that there are no universal moral principles. This is sometimes defended by appeal to examples, such as that of lying to a Nazi officer. Defenders of moral principles either bite the bullet and insist that lying is always wrong, or…

Nietzsche on the Good of the Guise There is a famous thesis in moral philosophy that has come to be known as the ‘guise of the good’. According to this ancient doctrine — which remains popular to this day — we only ever desire things that we perceive as being good, in at least some respect. As…

Doing Nothing in the Time of COVID-19 In the wake of COVID-19, memes asserting that, for the first time in history, we could save the world by doing absolutely nothing went (ahem) viral. The notion that one can achieve a great good by doing bugger all is blindingly attractive. How…

I recently heard someone affirm, as if this were common knowledge, that the essence of language is to communicate propositions. When I questioned this assumption, another person interjected that language was by definition the communication of propositions. I thought I’d entered some weird sci-fi novel in which the very notion…

Friedrich Nietzsche described his books Human, All Too Human and Thus Spoke Zarathustra as ‘a book for free spirits’ and ‘A Book for All and None’, respectively. What did he mean by this? A clue may be found in his uses of ‘we’ to pick out — and where necessary…

(with Aryeh Younger) ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’ asked the Roman poet Juvenal. For many today, the answer is to replace guardians altogether with blockchain technology. Blockchains are designed to be resistant to data modification, with each storage block (viz. record) containing an unalterable cryptographic timestamp. As such, the…

A vegan sausage by any other name would smell as sweet. Yet France has recently amended its agriculture bill to ban the use of so-called ‘meat and dairy terms’ to describe plant-based products that serve as meat substitutes. These include patties made from soybeans, and dairy alternatives made from oats…

’Tis the season of goodwill and cheer, but not many listeners over the past decade have found sufficient reserves of either to forgive Bob Dylan’s 2009 seasonal offering Christmas in the Heart. A sign of the Great American Songbook albums he had yet to record, Dylan delivers his cantankerous brand…