Contemporary philosophy - Topics

Why Hannah Arendt refused to be called a philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe and the habit of treating her as the exception Simone de Beauvoir and the claim that one becomes a woman What Judith Butler means by performativity and why it is so often misread Why preprint culture arrived so late in philosophy Quine on the indeterminacy of translation Wittgenstein's language games and the end of private meaning Why metaphysics survived the logical positivists' attack Gettier's 1963 counterexamples and why justified true belief failed Kripke's causal theory of reference Nozick's experience machine and whether you would plug in Aldo Leopold's land ethic and its uneasy place in academic philosophy The Chinese room and whether a machine can mean anything Frankfurt cases and the compatibilist answer on free will Why applied ethics became a field of its own after the 1970s How the trolley problem escaped the footnote Anscombe's 1958 essay and the revival of virtue ethics Experimental philosophy and its attack on armchair intuition Dennett and Nagel on whether consciousness can be explained Chalmers' hard problem and why consciousness resists explanation Rawls' original position and the veil of ignorance Arne Naess and the difference between shallow and deep environmentalism Parfit on personal identity: survival is not what matters