Philip Kitcher

Dec 27, 2023 | news.columbia.edu | Philip Kitcher

John Stuart Mill expressed many of the central tenets of liberalism with unsurpassed clarity and enduring influence. Yet Mill’s apparent victory in the marketplace of ideas has numbed us to the power of his arguments. To many readers today, his views can seem utterly familiar, even banal. Sharing insights from teaching Mill for many years, the eminent philosopher Philip Kitcher makes a cogent case for why we should read this nineteenth-century thinker now.

Jul 21, 2023 | nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com | Philip Kitcher

What should education aim to accomplish? What are its goals and how should it attempt to achieve them? Much excellent work, by philosophers and by policymakers, takes for granted the institutions and practices devised in the past. Yet, from time to time, it is important to stand back and to think more generally, to pose larger questions. My book, The Main Enterprise of the World, is written in that spirit.

May 3, 2023 | unherd.com | Philip Kitcher

A century and a half after the death of John Stuart Mill, it is easy to think that we have had enough of him. Although William Gladstone once posthumously canonised him as “the saint of rationality”, many contemporary thinkers believe he’s beyond his sell-by date. Monty Python offers an assessment for our age: “John Stuart Mill/ of his own free will/ on half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.”In the eyes of sceptics, Mill has lost his relevance.

Apr 26, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Philip Kitcher |Kieran Setiya

In August​ 1977, the New York Times ran a profile of the philosopher Saul Kripke, then 36 years old. Aged 17, he had proved a new result in modal logic – the logic of necessity and possibility – by building a mathematical model of ‘possible worlds’. He went on to transform philosophy, reviving dormant metaphysical questions. What makes us the particular people we are? Does science tell us how the world must be, not just how it is?