Analytic Vs. Continental Philosophy

Analytic philosophy is rationalistic: rigorous, systematic, literal-minded, formal (logical), dry, and detached. It is modelled on physics and maths and is particularly popular in the Anglo-Saxon world. Continental philosophy is humanistic: reflexive, literary, essayistic, charismatic. It is modelled on literature and art and is particularly popular in France, Germany, and Latin America. These two traditions dominate contemporary philosophy, and they are largely mutually incomprehensible. This is unfortunate since their strengths and weaknesses are somewhat complementary.

What's really new about Behavioural Economics?

Behavioural economics is the new kid on the economics block. It's young, brash, and pushing to take over from the ageing neoclassical orthodoxy. It has a new vision of how economics should work, but does it really see anything new?

Diagnosing and Refuting Conspiracy Thinking

The difficulty of conspiracy thinking is its pathological character; the problem of conspiracy thinking is the enormous danger of false positives. One way to identify and challenge conspiracy thinking is to evaluate its internal coherence: 'Do these claims even make sense in their own terms?'

The philosopher Vs. management theory

Matthew Stewart has a PhD in philosophy but despite this managed to get, and keep, a job in management consultancy. His book The Management Myth provides an entertaining and insightful analysis of the theory, history, and practise of that mysterious but ubiquitous cult of the modern world:  "management".

Who really owns cultural treasures?

Artistic and archaeological treasures are scattered throughout the world, often quite far from their places of origin. Is there something wrong with that? Who really owns such cultural treasures as the Elgin Marbles (sculptures from the Athens Parthenon) or Vermeer's paintings (17th century Dutch master, whose paintings are scattered through W. Europe and the USA)? Post-colonial nations in particular are quick to argue that such works were stolen from them (as indeed so much else certainly was), that their continued place in museums in New York, Paris or London is a continuation of colonial attitudes, and that they must be returned to their country of origin. But how are such claims justified? There seem to be 3 main ways of staking a claim on such works: national identity, law, and the "cultural heritage of all mankind"

Four Ideas of Sustainability

Sustainability concerns the relationship between humans and their natural environment over time. But there are various ethical understandings of that relationship with quite different implications. Two popular accounts actually repudiate human interdependence with nature by either making human interests completely subservient to a sacred nature, or by making nature completely subservient to human interests. Gro Brundtland's famous definition points in the right direction by focussing on the goal of meeting humanitarian needs in the present and the future, but her picture of human interests is too narrow and technocratic. What we need is a definition that is humanistic without necessarily being human-centred.

Martha Nussbaum lectures Europe on religious accommodation: The 2010 Unseld Lecture

Martha Nussbaum is an extremely American-liberal philosopher with a strong interest in US constitutional law and freedom of religion [previously]. She has recently been promoting the tradition of religious accommodation she finds in American legal and political history to Europe, including at the 2010 Unseld Lecture at the University of Tübingen that I attended and which this essay is a response to. Unfortunately Nussbaum's lecture was more an assertion of the universality of a particular American model of relations between state and religion than an argument for its relevance to a European audience, with our quite different legal traditions, politics, social make-up and history.