Monthly Archives: June 2007

A reply to Marc Hauser

I’ve been meaning to deal with this for a while.
At the beginning of June, Prospect magazine launched a blog, First Drafts. The second ever post there was a reply by the evolutionary psychologist and biologist Marc Hauser to my Guardian review of his book Moral Minds. It’s entitled ‘Did you actually read the book?‘, and [...]

The Idea of Continental Philosophy

This review of Simon Glendinning’s splendid little book The Idea of Continental Philosophy will appear in the next issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine.
The Idea of Continental Philosophy: A Philosophical Chronicle, Simon Glendinning (Edinburgh University Press) £14.99 / $22 (pb).
In 1958, several of Britain’s leading philosophers, most of them from Oxford, were invited by their French [...]

The Threat to Reason

This review of Dan Hind’s The Threat to Reason will appear in the next issue of New Humanist.
Dan Hind
THE THREAT TO REASON
Verso £14.99
We’ve heard a good deal about the Enlightenment recently: we’ve heard, for example, that Enlightenment values – having to do, broadly speaking, with the self-responsible use of reason and the rejection of traditional [...]

Richard Rorty: anti-foundationalism and politics

Reflecting on the legacy of the late Richard Rorty, Norm points out that there’s no necessary connection between philosophical and political commitments. In Rorty’s case, it’s entirely contingent that his (broadly anti-foundationalist) philosophical views should have lined up with his social democratic or liberal politics. After all, Norm argues, it’s possible to base a secular, [...]