Experience, Transformation and Imagination
In Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 10 (3):330-338.
Why Study the Humanities? The view from science
In New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding, edited by Stephen Grimm, Oxford University Press.
Should you be upset if your son or daughter comes home from college announcing that they are switching majors from physics (for example) to art history? Should we science majors have to take literature or ‘Western Civ” courses alongside their scientific curriculum? Are the humanities properly thought of as a source of knowledge or understanding? Do they provide something more akin to entertainment, or teach us something that is indispensable in a well- lived life? This paper addresses these questions.
A Philosopher of Science Looks at Ideal Theory
Social Philosophy and Policy, 33:1-2, p.11-31.
Rawls ignited a debate in political theory when he introduced a division between the ideal and nonideal parts of a theory of justice. In the ideal part of the theory, one presents a positive conception of justice in a setting that assumes perfect compliance with the rules of justice. In the nonideal part, one addresses the question of what happens under departures from compliance. Critics of Rawls have attacked his focus on ideal theory as a form of utopianism, and have argued that political theory should be focused instead on providing solutions to the manifest injustices of the real world. In this essay, I offer a defense of the ideal/nonideal theory distinction according to which it amounts to nothing more than a division of labor, and explore some scientific analogies. Rawls’s own focus on the ideal part of the theory, I argue, stems from a felt need to clarify the foundations of justice, rather than a utopian neglect of real world problems.
The Ethical Importance of Death
In Death And Anti-Death, Volume 4: Twenty Years After De Beauvoir, Thirty Years After Heidegger, edited by Charles Tandy, Palo Alto: Ria University Press, reprinted in Introduction to Philosophy: Contemporary Readings, edited by John Perry, Michael Bratman, John Martin Fischer, Oxford University Press (2012, 2018).
The paper is an attempt to grapple with the significance death has for how we live our lives. Should we fear death? What sort of loss occurs when someone dies? If death is a final and unequivocal end to existence, does that render life meaningless? What kind of value is possible in a life that inevitably ends? Would immortality be preferable?
