As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this Spring semester which will host AMAs by a number of world class academic philosophers working in a variety of different areas of contemporary philosophy. Check out our series announcement post to see blurbs for all the AMAs lined up this semester. You can also check out last semester’s series announcement post to see all the AMAs from Fall 2016. So far this semester we’ve had AMAs by Amie L. Thomasson (Miami) on metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of art, available here, and Samantha Brennan (Western) on normative and feminist ethics, available here. We continue our Spring 2017 Series this upcoming Tuesday with an AMA by Chris W. Surprenant (UNO). Hear it from him: Chris W. Surprenant I’m Chris W. Surprenant, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Orleans, where I direct the Alexis de Tocqueville Project in Law, Liberty, and Morality. I am the author of Kant and the Cultivation of Virtue (Routledge 2014), editor of Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration (forthcoming, Routledge 2017), and co-editor of Kant and Education: Interpretations and Commentary (Routledge 2011) and Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment (forthcoming, Routledge 2017). My current projects apply knowledge gained from studying the history of philosophy to contemporary issues in criminal justice reform, including the ethics of punishment. I’m also interested in business ethics and examining the connection between human well-being and entrepreneurship. During my first AMA in fall 2015, I was asked a number of questions on issues in moral philosophy; practical ethics, such as our approach to animals, the poor, or adjuncts in the academy; and how to be a successful graduate student and have a better chance of being a successful academic. I’ve been invited back to answer questions about my current work, our for-credit high school program in philosophy (you probably see me advertise it on here frequently!), the academy generally, and anything else that you want to talk about. AMA Professor Surprenant will join us Tuesday for a live Q&A on Tuesday at 3PM EST. Please feel free to post questions for him here. He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Surprenant to our community!

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this fall semester which kicked off with AMAs by Caspar Hare (MIT), Kevin Scharp, Kenneth Ehrenberg, Geoff Pynn and the Wi-Phi: Wireless Philosophy team. Check out our series announcement post to see all the upcoming AMAs this semester. We continue our series this upcoming Monday with an AMA by Stephen Puryear (NCSU). Hear it from him: Stephen Puryear I am an assistant professor of philosophy and affiliate of the Classical Studies program at NC State. Before arriving in Raleigh in 2008, I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh (2006) and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. My research interests include early modern philosophy and the German philosophical tradition, especially Leibniz, Kant, and Schopenhauer, as well as historical and contemporary work in metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. Much of my published work concerns the philosophy of Leibniz, but I have also written about Berkeley’s idealism, Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy, Frege’s philosophy of language, and the metaphysics of space and time. My main project at present is a book on Leibniz. Besides that, I continue to think about various topics in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, especially his ethics; in moral and political philosophy (obligation, consent, rights, normative theories, animal ethics, etc.); and in metaphysics (infinity, continuity, space, time, etc.). Much of my published work concerns the philosophy of Leibniz, but I have also written about Berkeley’s idealism, Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy, Frege’s philosophy of language, and the metaphysics of space and time. My main project at present is a book on Leibniz. Besides that, I continue to think about various topics in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, especially his ethics; moral and political philosophy (obligation, consent, rights, normative theories, animal ethics, etc.); and metaphysics (infinity, continuity, space, time, etc.). For more on my published work, see my publications page. Some published papers: “Schopenhauer on the Rights of Animals” “Finitism and the Beginning of the Universe” “Finitism, Divisibility, and the Beginning of the Universe: Replies to Loke and Dumsday” “Leibniz on the Metaphysics of Color” “Frege on Vagueness and Ordinary Language” “Monadic Interaction” AMA Professor Puryear will join us Monday for a couple hours of live Q&A on their research interests on Monday at noon. Please feel free to post questions for him here. He will look at this thread before they start and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Puryear to our community!

The mods of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Barry Lam, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College and the Executive Producer and Host of philosophy podcast Hi-Phi Nation. Barry will be joining us on Monday June 5th at 12PM EST to discuss his philosophy, podcasts and everything in between with a live AMA. Hear it from him: Barry Lam I am Barry Lam, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College and the Executive Producer and Host of the Hi-Phi Nation podcast, the first story-driven documentary-style show about philosophy. I just completed production and release of the first season of Hi-Phi Nation as Humanities Writ-Large fellow at Duke University, where the first season covered stories and philosophy ranging from the possibilities of posthumous harm, the morality of war, the referent of religious terms in Christianity and Islam, the philosophy of music, the replication crisis in the statistical sciences, philosophy of gender, Kuhn and scientific realism, and the philosophy of love. I would be happy to talk about any of the substantive issues that arose from these episodes, as well as discuss any issues concerning doing philosophy in a story-driven way. Here are a few select episodes on Soundcloud: Episode 1: The Wishes of the Dead Episode 3: The Morality of War Episode 4: The Name of God Episode 7: Hackademics II (Epistemology of Replication Crisis) Some interviews and discussions about Hi-Phi Nation: My posts about the show at Leiter Reports The American Philosophical Association Blog interview Vassar’s Interview Elucidations Podcast, extended discussion of the wishes of the dead My own philosophical work has been in epistemology and the philosophy of language, particularly on the nature of epistemic rationality, and in experimental semantics and pragmatics. I would be happy to have a discussion about those topics. In the past two years I’ve set technical research aside to produce what I hope will be an ongoing series of narrative story-driven philosophy akin to the best productions we have for economics and the social sciences, such as Freakonomics Radio and Invisibilia. It is my hope that having a high-production story-driven show about philosophy will open up the field to lots of new people, as well as let existing fans of philosophy appreciate the way it connects with journalism, history, law, and nonfiction writing. Links: Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast Go to the website and subscribe to the blog for announcements Follow on Twitter Follow on Facebook Paypal donation page Patreon Page AMA Please feel free to post questions for Barry here. He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Barry Lam to our community!

This past academic year the moderators of /r/philosophy organised an ongoing AMA series with 18 different philosophers working on a variety of different topics, from metaphysics to logic, bioethics to philosophy education. Our series has now officially come to an end, and we want to thank everyone for their support and participation. Special thanks go of course to our AMA philosophers, as well as Joy Mizan at Oxford University Press for helping reach out to a number of different people for us, as well as freeing up open-access materials from many different authors. Barry Lam AMA While we will not be running a summer AMA series, we do want to note that we will be running one final AMA before the fall, by philosopher Barry Lam, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College and creator of Hi-Phi Nation: A Show About Philosophy That Turns Stories Into Ideas. Professor Lam will be joining us on June 5 to discuss Hi-Phi Nation and the art of creating philosophy podcasts which appeal to both philosophers and non-philosophers. AMA Survey We’d like to take this time to open up a survey for you to comment on the AMA series; what you liked, what you didn’t, what’d you change, who you’d like to see, etc. Please take a couple minutes to take the AMA Series Survey so we can decide whether to run it again next year, and if so, how to do it. You can take the survey HERE. Thanks again to everyone who participated, and we hope that you found the AMAs as interesting as we did. We welcome all feedback in the hope that we can continue bringing great content to you in the future. AMA Hub Date Name Appointment/Affiliation Topic Personal Website AMA Link August 30 Caspar Hare Professor of Philosophy, MIT Ethics, Intro to Philosophy MOOC Link Link September 7 Kevin Scharp Reader, Department of Philosophy, University of St Andrews Philosophy of Language, Logic Link Link September 26 Kenneth Ehrenberg Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Adjunct Professor of Law, University of Alabama Philosophy of Law Link Link October 12 Geoff Pynn Associate Professor of Philosophy, Northern Illinois University Epistemology, Early Modern, Philosophy of Language Link Link October 24 Wi-Phi Team Wi-Phi Directors Wi-Phi free online philosophy videos, public philosophy Link Link November 14 Stephen Puryear Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Affiliate, Classical Studies, North Carolina State University History of Philosophy Link Link November 29 Roy T. Cook Professor of Philosophy and Scholar of the College, University of Minnesota Philosophy of Logic & Mathematics, Comics Studies Link Link December 12 Carrie Jenkins Canada Research Chair in Philosophy, University of British Columbia Epistemology, Philosophy of Love Link Link January 11 Amie L. Thomasson Professor of Philosophy & Cooper Fellow, University of Miami Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Art Link Link January 25 Samantha Brennan Professor of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research, Western University, Rotman Institute of Philosophy Member Normative Ethics, Feminist Ethics Link Link January 31 Chris W. Surprenant Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of New Orleans and Founding Director, Alexis de Tocqueville Project Moral and Political Philosophy Link Link February 15 S. Matthew Liao Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics, Director of the Center for Bioethics, Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy, New York University Ethics, Bioethics, Moral Psychology Link Link February 22 David Chalmers Professor of Philosophy, Co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, New York University & Professor of Philosophy, Australian National University Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Technology, Metaphilosophy Link Link March 8 Lisa Bortolotti Professor of Philosophy, University of Birmingham Philosophy of Mind Link Link March 22 Shannon Vallor William J. Rewak, S.J. Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Technology, Ethics of Emerging Technologies Link Link April 5 L.A. Paul Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, Professorial Fellow of the Arche Research Centre at the University of St Andrews Transformative Experience, Rationality, Authenticity Link Link April 26 Jay L. Garfield Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Buddhist Studies at Smith College, Visiting Professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central University of Tibetan Studies Indian Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind Link Link May 10 Kenny Easwaran Associate Professor of Philosophy, Texas A&M University Formal Epistemology, Decision Theory Link Link

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this Spring semester which will host AMAs by a number of world class academic philosophers working in a variety of different areas of contemporary philosophy. Check out our series announcement post to see blurbs for all the AMAs lined up this semester. You can also check out last semester’s series announcement post to see all the AMAs from Fall 2016. So far this semester we’ve had AMAs by Amie L. Thomasson on metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of art, available here, Samantha Brennan on normative and feminist ethics, available here, Chris W. Surprenant on moral/political philosophy, available here, S. Matthew Liao on ethics, bioethics and neuroethics, available here, David Chalmers on consciousness, technology and various areas of philosophy, available here, Lisa Bortolotti on irrationality and the philosophy of mind, available here and Shannon Vallor on philosophy of technology and science, available here. We continue our Spring 2017 Series this upcoming Wednesday with an AMA by L.A. Paul (UNC - Chapel Hill). Hear it from her: L.A. Paul I’m a philosopher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose main interests are in metaphysics, phenomenology, and cognitive science. If you want to know more about me, here’s my website, an interview about my research interests with 3am magazine, and an interview with more personal sorts of questions at NewAPPS. Much of my recent work focuses on the nature of experience and its role in constructing the self. I’m especially interested in exploring the way that some experiences can be transformative. Transformative experiences are momentous, life-changing experiences that shape who we are and what we care about. Going to war, winning the lottery, having a baby, losing your faith, or being spiritually reborn are all experiences that transform us epistemically, and through the epistemic transformations they bring, such experiences change us personally. Massive epistemic change can restructure who you are and what you care about. When you have a transformative experience, something new is revealed to you—what’s like to be in that situation or what it’s like to have that experience. Once you discover this, you discover how you’ll respond, and in particular, who you’ll become as the result of the transformation. In this sense, an exploration of transformative experience is also an exploration of the self, since we are exploring the way that experience allows us to discover who we are and what we care about. We discover new features of reality through experience, and this discovery turns us back into a new understanding of our own selves. I prefer to work on these philosophical questions using somewhat technical and formal tools from contemporary philosophy drawn from metaphysics, epistemology, decision theory, and the philosophy of mind. I’m also interested in empirical work in cognitive science, statistics, and psychology, and I try to bring relevant empirical research to bear on my conceptual work. I see myself as a defender of the importance of phenomenology and lived experience, but within a context that emphasizes the use of formal tools and empirically informed research combined with analytical metaphysics to frame and tackle philosophical problems. I’ve done a lot of work in the past on the nature of time and the metaphysics of causation and counterfactuals, and that work also informs the project of transformative experience in some obvious and some not-so-obvious ways. Recent Links: There have been a number of good discussions in the media of transformative experience. Here are a few, and there are more links on my website. In the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman discusses impossible decisions and the transformative experience of seeing color for the first time In the Wall Street Journal, Alison Gopnik discusses my original argument about the transformative nature of becoming a parent here In The New York Times, David Brooks discusses my book The Philosopher’s Zone has a fun podcast about transformative experience here OUP Book Thanks to OUP, you can save 30% Professor L.A. Paul’s new book by using promocode AAFLYG6 on the oup.com site, while the series is ongoing: Transformative Experience AMA Professor Paul will join us Wednesday for a live Q&A on 4/5 at 11AM EST. Please feel free to post questions for her here. She will look at this thread before she starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Paul our community!

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this Spring semester which will host AMAs by a number of world class academic philosophers working in a variety of different areas of contemporary philosophy. Check out our series announcement post to see blurbs for all the AMAs lined up this semester. You can also check out last semester’s series announcement post to see all the AMAs from Fall 2016. So far this semester we’ve had AMAs by Amie L. Thomasson on metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of art, available here, Samantha Brennan on normative and feminist ethics, available here, Chris W. Surprenant on moral/political philosophy, available here and S. Matthew Liao on ethics, bioethics and neuroethics, available here. We continue our Spring 2017 Series this upcoming Wednesday with an AMA by David Chalmers (NYU). Hear it from him: David Chalmers I’m a philosopher at New York University and the Australian National University. I’m interested in consciousness: e.g. the hard problem (see also this TED talk), the science of consciousness, zombies, and panpsychism. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the philosophy of technology: e.g. the extended mind (another TED talk), the singularity, and especially the universe as a simulation and virtual reality. I have a sideline in metaphilosophy: e.g. philosophical progress, verbal disputes, and philosophers’ beliefs. I help run PhilPapers and other online resources. Here’s my website (it was cutting edge in 1995; new version coming soon). Some Recent Links of Interest: “What It’s Like to be a Philosopher” - (My Life Story) Consciousness and the Universe Reverse Debate on Consciousness - (channeling the other side) The Mind Bleeds into the World: A Conversation with David Chalmers - (issues about VR, AI, and philosophy that I’ve been thinking about recently) OUP Books Thanks to OUP, you can save 30% on any OUP title by Professor Chalmers by using promocode AAFLYG6 on the oup.com site, while the series is ongoing. Those titles are: The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives The Character of Consciousness Constructing the World AMA Professor Chalmers will join us Wednesday for a live Q&A on 2/22 at 12PM EST. Please feel free to post questions for him here. He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Chalmers to our community!

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this fall semester which kicked off with AMAs by Caspar Hare, Kevin Scharp, Kenneth Ehrenberg, Geoff Pynn, the Wi-Phi: Wireless Philosophy team, Stephen Puryear and Roy T Cook. Check out our series announcement post to see all the AMAs from this semester. We finish off our fall series this upcoming Monday with an AMA by Carrie Jenkins (UBC). Hear it from her: Carrie Jenkins I’m Carrie Jenkins, a writer and philosopher based in Vancouver, BC. I am a Canada Research Chair in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator on the SSHRC funded project The Nature of Love, and a Co-Investigator on the John Templeton Foundation funded project Knowledge Beyond Natural Science. I studied philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, and since then have worked at the University of St Andrews, the Australian National University, the University of Michigan, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Aberdeen. From 2011 to 2016, I was one of three principal editors of the award-winning philosophy journal Thought. I recently won an American Philosophical Association Public Philosophy Op Ed Contest award. This year I am also a student again, working towards an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. My philosophical interests have stubbornly refused to be pinned down over the years. Broadly speaking they include epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic and language, and philosophy of love. But I’m basically interested in everything. My first book was on a priori arithmetical knowledge, and my second is on the nature of romantic love. I have written papers on knowledge, explanation, realism, flirting, epistemic normativity, modality, concepts, dispositions, naturalism, paradoxes, intuitions, and verbal disputes … among other things! A lot of my recent work is about love, because in addition to its intrinsic interest I see some urgency to the need for more and better critical thinking about this topic. Some Links of Interest NPR 13.7 Interview - Exploring the Metaphysics of Love Globe and Mail article - What’s Love Got to do With Sex? Maybe Everything, winner, APA Public Philosophy Op Ed Contest 2016 Elle Canada - New Ideas on Love CBC podcast interview on love and sex ed Review of new book What Love Is and What It Could Be AMA Professor Jenkins will join us Monday for a live Q&A on her research interests on Monday at 4PM EST. Please feel free to post questions for her here. She will look at this thread before she starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Jenkins to our community!

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this fall semester which kicked off with AMAs by Caspar Hare (MIT), Kevin Scharp and Kenneth Ehrenberg. Check out our series announcement post to see all the upcoming AMAs this semester. We continue our series this upcoming Wednesday with Geoff Pynn, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University. Hear it from him: Geoff Pynn is an associate professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University. He earned his PhD from Yale University; specializes in epistemology and philosophy of language; and regularly teaches early modern European philosophy, philosophy of religion, and logic. He is also interested in the philosophical problems posed by addiction, anarchism, conspiracy theories, moral panics, and social justice movements. His favorite philosophers are Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, and the nineteenth-century anarchist feminist Voltairine De Cleyre. His most recent published work is on contextualism in epistemology. You can download all his papers from his academia.edu page. He has a number of Wi-Phi videos on: Critical thinking Deductive arguments Abductive arguments Inductive arguments (coming soon!) The tracking theory of knowledge Virtue epistemology Contextualism (coming soon!) Geoff’s current research focuses on social epistemology. Miranda Fricker coined the phrase “testimonial injustice” to describe what occurs when some prejudice or bias causes a person’s testimony to be granted less (or more) credibility than it deserves. For example, imagine a police officer who refuses to believe a suspect’s truthful eyewitness testimony simply because the suspect is black. Or consider how someone’s rural accent or stilted English can make you more skeptical than you’d otherwise be about whether he is telling the truth. Intuitively, it seems wrong to let your prejudices sway your credibility judgments, and it seems like people who are disbelieved because of someone else’s bias have a right to complain. But it’s hard to say why such treatment is wrongful. In one paper, Geoff is developing an account of the harm of testimonial injustice. The basic idea is that when you let your prejudices sway your credibility judgments, you’re degrading the speaker. Degradation is a complex social harm where a person a mistreated in a way that represents her as if she deserved the mistreatment in virtue of the kind of person she is. Epistemic degradation may not be as dramatic or painful as torture, revenge porn, or public humiliation, but it can be extremely demoralizing and have lasting effects. Like all forms of degrading treatment, biased credibility judgments reduce a person’s social standing, encouraging and rewarding behavior that treats them as if they deserved disrespect. (Working on this paper has also sparked Geoff’s interest in degradation, humiliation, shame, and other forms of psycho-social harm.) Geoff’s other current project is on testimonial injustice, plea bargaining, and false confessions. More than 90 percent of criminal cases in the U.S. never go to trial. Instead, a prosecutor extracts a guilty plea from a suspect by either promising him a reduced sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, or threatening him with a more severe charge should his case go to trial. While many people who accept plea bargains are guilty, at least some plead guilty simply to avoid the risk of a more severe punishment. Such cases involve a particularly nasty form of testimonial injustice: enticing a speaker to lie in order to treat her lie as if it were credible enough to justify punishing her. Geoff is also the graduate adviser for Northern Illinois University’s top-rated philosophy MA program, which caters primarily to students who want to get a PhD in philosophy, but do not have the background to get into a PhD program directly. Like many other terminal MA programs, NIU’s offers full funding and living stipends, and Geoff maintains a guide to funding opportunities at terminal MA programs. He’s happy to talk about any aspect of philosophy grad school. Some relevant papers: An overview of contextualism in epistemology (forthcoming in Oxford Handbooks) A piece on the “intuitive argument” for contextualism (forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Epistemic Contextualism) A new form of contextualism, designed to side-step a slew of objections to the view that emerged in the early 2000s An explanation of the “illusion of ignorance” produced by skeptical arguments A sort of math-y piece dismantling a popular criticism of the Moorean response to skepticism AMA Professor Pynn will join us Wednesday for a couple hours of live Q&A on his research in epistemology, the philosophy of language and other areas. Please feel free to post questions for Professor Pynn here. He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Pynn to our community!

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this fall semester which kicked off with AMAs by Caspar Hare (MIT) and Kevin Scharp. Check out our series announcement post to see all the upcoming AMAs this semester. We continue our series this upcoming Monday with Kenneth M. Ehrenberg, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Alabama. Hear it from Professor Ehrenberg himself: After getting my JD from Yale in ’97 I worked for two years as a lawyer, one with the NYC Parks Dept and one with the firm O’Melveny & Myers (doing first environmental insurance defense and then a private antitrust case against Microsoft), before going back for my PhD in philosophy at Columbia. There I studied under Jeremy Waldron and Joseph Raz and had worked with Jules Coleman at Yale and when he visited Columbia. My dissertation was about doing legal philosophy by investigating the functions of law in general and legal systems. Some of the ideas are reprised in my new book, The Functions of Law (OUP 2016), although it is a completely newly written work with a completely new ontological claim. OUP is offering a 30% discount on the book: UK addressees can use the code ALAUTH16 and US addressees can use the code ALAUTHC4 for 30% off. After finishing my PhD, I took my first tenure track job at University at Buffalo, SUNY, taking leave to do a term at Oxford as the HLA Hart visiting fellow in 2010. In 2012 I took a second tenure track job at University of Alabama, heading up their jurisprudence specialization. My main areas of interest are in analytic general jurisprudence (especially the ontology of law and methodology of legal philosophy), the relation of law to morality and grounds of legal authority, and the epistemology of evidence law. The following is a short description of the book. This book seeks to contribute to a legal positivist picture of law by defending two metaphysical claims about law and investigating their methodological implications. One claim is that the law is a kind of artifact, a thoroughgoing human creation for performing certain tasks or accomplishing certain goals. That is, artifacts are generally understood in terms of their functions. When discussing artifacts, the notion of function need not be as mysterious or problematic as might be the case with biological functions. The other claim is that the law is an institution, a specific kind of artifact that creates artificial roles which allow for the establishment and manipulation of rights and duties among those subject to the institution. The methodological implication of this picture of law is that it is best understood in terms of the social functions that it performs and that the job of the legal philosopher is to investigate those functions. This position is advanced against non-positivist theories of law that nonetheless rely upon notions of law’s function, and is also advanced against positivist pictures that tend to de-emphasize or overlook the central role that function must play to understand the nature of law. One key implication of this picture is that it can help explain how law might give people reasons to act beyond its use of force to do so. AMA Professor Ehrenberg will join us Monday for a couple hours of live Q&A on his research in the philosophy of law. Please feel free to post questions for Professor Ehrenberg here. He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Ehrenberg to our community!

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this fall semester which kicks off this upcoming Tuesday August 30th, 1PM EST. Caspar Hare, Professor of Philosophy at MIT, will be joining us to answer questions about his work on ethics, rationality and a special edX course he is running called “Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness”. Professor Hare has published two books, The Limits of Kindness and On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects. You can read free online reviews of those books here and here respectively. He has also published a number of papers, all of which are available online at his website for free. Check out some blurbs for his books below: The Limits of Kindness Caspar Hare presents a novel approach to questions of what we ought to do, and why we ought to do it. The traditional way to approach this subject is to begin by supposing a foundational principle, and then work out its implications. Consequentialists say that we ought to make the world impersonally better, for instance, while Kantian deontologists say that we ought to act on universalizable maxims. And contractualists say that we ought to act in accordance with the terms of certain hypothetical contracts. These principles are all grand and controversial. The motivating idea behind The Limits of Kindness is that we can tackle some of the most difficult problems in normative ethics by starting with a principle that is humble and uncontroversial. Being moral involves wanting particular other people to be better off. From these innocuous beginnings, Hare leads us to surprising conclusions about how we ought to resolve conflicts of interest, whether we ought to create some people rather than others, what we ought to want in an infinite world, when we ought to make sacrifices for the sake of needy strangers, and why we cannot, on pain of irrationality, attribute great importance to the boundaries between people. On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects Caspar Hare makes an original and compelling case for “egocentric presentism,” a view about the nature of first-person experience, about what happens when we see things from our own particular point of view. A natural thought about our first-person experience is that “all and only the things of which I am aware are present to me.” Hare, however, goes one step further and claims, counterintuitively, that the thought should instead be that “all and only the things of which I am aware are present.” There is, in other words, something unique about me and the things of which I am aware. On Myself and Other, Less Important Subjects represents a new take on an old view, known as solipsism, which maintains that people’s experiences give them grounds for believing that they have a special, distinguished place in the world–for example, believing that only they exist or that other people do not have conscious minds like their own. Few contemporary thinkers have taken solipsism seriously. But Hare maintains that the version of solipsism he argues for is in indeed defensible, and that it is uniquely capable of resolving some seemingly intractable philosophical problems–both in metaphysics and ethics–concerning personal identity over time, as well as the tension between self-interest and the greater good. Professor Hare is teaching a free online MOOC this semester called Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness. You can read an article about the MOOC by MIT News here. This iteration of 24.00x is (to our knowledge) the first philosophy MOOC in history to offer instructor grading of, and comments on, your work. Basically you get to do philosophy for real, with individual instruction, for a small fraction of the cost of taking the course at MIT. The blurb for the course is as follows: This philosophy course has two goals. The first goal is to introduce you to the things that philosophers think about. We will look at some perennial philosophical problems: Is there a God? What is knowledge, and how do we get it? What is the place of our consciousness in the physical world? Do we have free will? How do we persist over time, as our bodily and psychological traits change? The second goal is to get you thinking philosophically yourself. This will help you develop your critical reasoning and argumentative skills more generally. Along the way we will draw from late, great classical authors and influential contemporary figures. AMA Professor Hare will join us this Tuesday for a couple hours of live Q&A on his work and teaching, as well as philosophy and education more generally. Please feel free to post questions for Professor Hare here. He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Hare to our community!