Essay

Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics: Actions, Reasons, Causes … and Ends

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by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ I’ve been saying that I’d like a return to philosophical “normalcy,” meaning that I’d like us to stop indulging what I’ve been calling, alternatively, “crazy” and “desperate” philosophical positions: Panpsychism; Hard Determinism; Eliminative Materialism and “Illusionism”; Platonism; Mind/Body Dualism; and so on. I’m running an ongoing series of conversations with Crispin Sartwell alongside these prolegomena, […]

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Course Notes

Course Notes: Arthur Danto on “Surface” and “Deep” Interpretation

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by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Before the coronavirus turned everything upside-down, the students in my upper-division Aesthetics course and I were working through Arthur Danto’s theory of interpretation, so as eventually to bring it into tension with Susan Sontag’s take in her famous essay, “Against Interpretation,” on which I wrote in the early days of EA’s founding. Prior to our […]

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Essay

Envisaging Homer’s World

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by Mark English To what extent do we have access to the thought-worlds of past eras? My experience of doing research in intellectual history has led me to be acutely aware of the difficulties. At first you think you understand. Then, gradually, you realize the extent of your ignorance. The subtleties of a given culture are essential to it: they […]

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