Lisa Herzog is Professor of Political Philosophy and Dean at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Netherlands. She has written on the philosophical dimensions of markets, liberalism and social justice, ethics in organizations, and the future of work. Her most recent book, Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy, explores the political dimensions ..read more

Henry Dicks is an environmental philosopher who specializes in the philosophical aspects of biomimicry and learning from nature. His recent work, The Biomimicry Revolution: Learning from Nature How to Inhabit the Earth, explores the philosophical significance of biomimicry, the imitation, emulation, and process of learning from nature. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Dicks discusses the ..read more

Philosophical works about scientific realism often point to public trust in science as a key motivating consideration. The intuitive idea is that if we have reason to think scientific theories are approximately true, then we have all the more reason to think our trust in science is warranted. Yet this raises the concern that philosophical ..read more

Imagine a parent–teacher conference. The teacher tells you your child is “on track” to graduate from high school. Relieved, you follow up: “Great! Can you tell me more precisely what that means?” The teacher responds: “Sure. ‘Being on track’ is a technical term. It means the probability of graduation is 50%–66%. Of course, there are ..read more

Though people discuss consent in a variety of contexts, consent is perhaps most discussed in the contexts of medicine and sex. While there are obvious differences between consenting to a medical procedure and consenting to sex, there are also similarities between the concepts of consent. In both, valid consent is the kind of agreement that ..read more

As a student, I was never introduced to the work of Martinican philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. I read Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth on my own during my Ph.D. in Paris, and since then Fanon’s ideas have constantly accompanied and deeply shaped my own philosophical thinking. With one exception ..read more

The world appears to be a certain way, but sometimes appearances are deceiving. This doesn’t seem to undermine what we think we know, for instance, the apparently obvious fact that we have hands. But, how do you know you’re not dreaming right now? Or better, do you know you’re not a handless brain in a ..read more

For at least four U.S. presidential cycles, those involved and concerned with the American political landscape have lamented the threats to, as well as the loss of, the deliberative democratic spirit. And this is happening at the same time that, as Scott Aiken and Robert Talisse pointed out in The Critique in 2017, “contemporary democracy ..read more

[This blog post describes the research I presented at the 2022 APA Pacific meeting in Vancouver, in a presentation called “How to Have an Insight.” This research explores how Simon Weil’s concept of attention can help us better understand Iris Murdoch’s views on the topic, and how to think about people in a way that ..read more

Owning the confusion that you honestly have in facing things is a key to philosophy. But this difficult, personally uncomfortable thing is professionally discouraged. Mark Fiocco explains why it shouldn't be ..read more