The moderators of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Professor Debra Satz, Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and co-host of the Philosophy Talk radio program. This AMA is the fourth in our Spring 2018 AMA Series; you can find more details on all of this semester’s AMAs with philosophers by going to the AMA Hub Post. You can find all of our previous AMAs over the years by going to the AMA wiki. Professor Satz will be joining us on Monday February 19th at 12PM ET to discuss issues in political science, public policy, the ethical limits of markets and more. Hear it from her: Debra Satz I’m Debra Satz, the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and co-host of the Philosophy Talk radio program. I grew up in the Bronx, and was the first of my family to go to college. From there, I graduated from City College of New York and received my PhD from M.I.T. where – after toying with the idea of writing on the philosophy of logic – I wrote a dissertation focusing on Marx’s theory of social progress. Although I have traveled far from where I began, my experiences growing up in the Bronx continue to influence my work and thought. My philosophical work has been broadly concerned with the economic preconditions for a democratic society of equals. But rather than approaching this question at a very high level of abstraction, I have focused on the ethics behind the creation and operation of particular markets. Markets in the abstract are models of freedom and equality. Freedom because each has the choice to enter into, or refrain from entering, any particular exchange. Moreover, because each of us is linked through countless others, no one is under the thumb of any particular person. This latter point also underwrites our equality. In theory, neither is dependent on the other and each has the right to refuse a deal which we view as unfair. But, in reality, many markets depart very far from that theory. Some markets involve agents who are asymmetrically situated: One person desperately needs a good that only the other has (think of credit markets in the developing world); or, one person has relevant knowledge that another person lacks (think of the market for used cars). Moreover, some markets involve risks that fall on others besides the transacting agent (think of exchanges that generate pollution); or markets where others are transacting on our behalf (think of child labor markets where parents transact on behalf of their children, or governments where dictators transact debt on behalf of their populations). My book, Why Some Things Should Not be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets develops a theory that distinguishes between ordinary markets that resemble abstract markets and what I call noxious markets. Noxious markets are characterized along four parameters: weak agency, background vulnerability and inequality of the transacting agents, harms to individuals, and harms to society. My book examines markets in body parts, commercial surrogacy, child labor and prostitution. Importantly, I argue that the fact that a market is noxious does not entail the conclusion that we should ban it. It may be possible to increase agency (by giving parties better information) or address third party harms through regulation. But a message of my work, which resonates with a long tradition of political economy (where figures such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx and RH Tawney are central) is that not all markets are the same. I also have interests in the distribution of educational opportunities, where I have argued that the sharp divide policy makers and philosophers draw between adequacy approaches and equality approaches is overdrawn. A theory of distributing educational opportunity that is adequate for a democratic society will have strong egalitarian elements. In addition to pursuing my interests in education (which was my path out of poverty), I am writing a paper which examines the role of the state’s distribution of in kind goods (such as health care) for a democratic society of equals. I look forward to discussing my work with you on reddit! Links of Interest: My book: Why Some Things Should Not be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. Thanks to OUP can purchase it 30% off from their site with promocode AAFLYG6. A newer co-authored book dealing with the relations between ethics and economics: Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy, Third Edition My Stanford Encyclopedia Article on Feminist Perspectives on Reproduction and the Family My Ethics article “Equality, Adequacy and Education for Citizenship” My class day speech at Stanford University on the Moral Limits of Markets The Philosophy Talk radio program which I co-host AMA Please feel free to post questions for Professor Satz 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 Debra Satz to our community!

The mods of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Michael Cholbi, Professor of Philosophy and Director, California Center for Ethics and Policy, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. This AMA is the second in our Spring 2018 AMA Series; you can find more details on all of this semester’s AMAs with philosophers by going to the AMA Hub Post. You can find all of our previous AMAs over the years by going to the AMA wiki. Professor Cholbi will be joining us on Thursday January 25th at 1PM ET to discuss issues in ethical theory, moral psychology, practical ethics, Kant and the philosophy of death and dying. Hear it from him: Michael Cholbi I’m Professor of Philosophy at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. I work and publish in a number of area of ethics, including ethical theory, moral psychology, practical ethics, and the history of moral philosophy. Much (though not all) of my work has a Kantian flavor – but do note I’m willing to take Kant and Kantians to task when need be! (For a good overview of my work on Kant’s ethics, check out my book Understanding Kant’s Ethics). Here are some more specifics about my research: I’m perhaps best known for my work on philosophy of death and dying, including my work on suicide and grief. With respect to suicide, my views are complicated: I argue that most acts of suicide violate our Kantian duty to preserve our rational agency, but precisely because this is a self-regarding duty or duty to self, then at a social level, individuals have an autonomy-based right to shorten their lives, consistent with their moral obligations to others; that medically assisted dying is not contrary to the moral norms of medicine and that the medical profession should not monopolize access to desirable ways of shortening our lives; that, all other things being equal, mental health problems provide equally strong justifications for suicide as do ‘physical’ ailments, etc.; and that non-invasive public health measures to prevent suicide are typically defensible. Grief is an understudied phenomenon among philosophers. Much of my work here is concerned with understanding how grief can makes our lives better — why we wouldn’t find it desirable to be unable to grieve, like Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger — despite the fact that it involves pain or mental distress. In the book I’m writing, I propose that grief represents an especially fruitful opportunity to know ourselves and understand our own commitments and values more deeply. In other areas of social ethics, I write on paternalism, defending what I call the ‘rational will’ conception of paternalism, wherein paternalism is wrong because it intercedes in our powers of rational agency in various ways; on race and criminal justice, where I argue (in a forthcoming paper in Ethics) that racial bias in the administration of the death penalty in the U.S. merits its de facto abolition; and on the philosophy of work and labor, a new area of research where I’m exploring universal basic income and notions of meaningful work. As you can tell, my work is very diverse, both topically and methodologically. I try to integrate empirical work from economics, legal studies, and psychiatry into my research where appropriate. I look forward to discussing any and all of my work with the reddit audience! Links of Interest: My Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on suicide My review of Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s book on near death experiences A piece on grief in Four By Three A blog post on paternalism from LSE’s The Forum AMA Please feel free to post questions for Professor Cholbi 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 Michael Cholbi to our community!

The mods of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Rivka Weinberg, Professor of Philosophy at Scripps College, who works on procreative ethics, bioethics and the metaphysics of life and death. She is the author of The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation Might Be Permissible (OUP, 2015). Professor Weinberg will be joining us on Monday November 27th at 1PM EST to discuss issues in procreative ethics, bioethics and more. Hear it from her: Rivka Weinberg I’m Professor of Philosophy at Scripps College, which is one of the Claremont Colleges, in way too sunny California. I grew up in Brooklyn (before it was cool), worked my way through Brooklyn College as a paralegal, and got my PhD. from the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Most of my philosophical work has focused on the ethics and metaphysics of creating people. It still surprises me that so many people just go ahead and create an entire new human without really thinking through what they are doing to that person. It surprises me even more that so many people seem to think that life is inherently good and that living is a privilege and a treat. I find that outlook very hard to understand, though I haven’t given up trying. My book, The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible, is a culmination of my many years of thinking about what we are doing when we create a person. As the title reveals, I think we are imposing life’s risks on that person, and I consider when and why that set of risks may be permissible to impose. Although it might seem foreign to think about having a baby as imposing life’s risks on someone, I don’t think it’s as counterintuitive a conception of procreation as it might initially seem. It’s not odd to think that a teenager shouldn’t have a baby because that baby will have lots of disadvantages, i.e., face the high degree of significant life risks that are associated with being born to teen parents. It’s not unusual to think that people who carry genes for terrible diseases, such as Tay Sachs, should try to make sure that they don’t partner with another carrier and bear a child who will have to suffer so terribly. Many people think that they shouldn’t have children who would be at a high risk for a life of abject poverty. And those are all ways of thinking about whether the life risks we impose on those we create are permissible for us to impose. So that is my framework for thinking about procreative ethics. Within that framework, I think about what kind of act procreation is, whether it is always wrong, whether metaphysical puzzles such as Parfit’s famous non-identity problem make it almost always permissible (short answer: so not!), and what makes someone parentally responsible. In my book, I arrive at principles of procreative permissibility based on a broadly contractualist framework of permissible risk imposition. I am currently finishing up some papers on whether parental responsibility has a set endpoint, or indeed any endpoint; and on some aspects of risk imposition that are unique to, and uniquely problematic for, procreative acts. I am also thinking a lot about pointlessness, about how life is not the kind of thing that can have a point or purpose, and whether we can rationally find that disappointing or even tragic. I probably should have thought that through before I had children who now have to live pointless lives, like everyone else. Ah well. Fun fact: I have two children, and ten siblings. Links of Interest: Her book: The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation Might Be Permissible An article reviewing David Benatar’s antinalist book (Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence): “Is Having Children Always Wrong?” NewBooksNetwork podcast interview on her book “The Moral Complexity of Sperm Donation” Short piece in Quartz: “Is it unethical to have children in the era of climate change?” Another short piece in Quartz: “When is it immoral to have children?” AMA Please feel free to post questions for Professor Weinbreg 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 us in welcoming Professor Rivka Weinberg to our community!

The moderators of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Professor Duncan Pritchard, Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy, UC Irvine & Professor of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh. This AMA is the seventh in our Spring 2018 AMA Series; you can find more details on all of this semester’s AMAs with philosophers by going to the AMA Hub Post. You can find all of our previous AMAs over the years by going to the AMA wiki. Professor Pritchard will be joining us on Monday May 7th at 1PM EDT to discuss issues in epistemology and scepticism. Hear it from him: Duncan Pritchard I’m Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. I work mainly in epistemology. In my first book, Epistemic Luck, (Oxford UP, 2005), I argued for a distinctive methodology that I call anti-luck epistemology, and along the way offered a modal account of luck. In my second book, The Nature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations, (with A. Haddock & A. Millar), (Oxford UP, 2010), I expanded on anti-luck epistemology to offer a new theory of knowledge (anti-luck virtue epistemology), and also explained how knowledge relates to such cognate notions as understanding and cognitive achievement. I also discussed the topic of epistemic value. In my third book, Epistemological Disjunctivism, (Oxford UP, 2012), I defended a radical conception of perceptual knowledge, one that treats such knowledge as paradigmatically supported by reasons that are both rational and reflectively accessible. In my most recent book, Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing, (Princeton UP, 2015), I offer an innovative response to the problem of radical scepticism. This argues that what looks like a single problem is in fact two logically distinct problems in disguise. Accordingly, I argue that we need a ‘biscopic’ resolution to scepticism that is suitably sensitive to each aspect of the sceptical difficulty. To this end I bring together two approaches to radical scepticism that have hitherto been thought to be competing, but which I argue are in fact complementary—viz., epistemological disjunctivism and a Wittgensteinian hinge epistemology. Right now I’m working on a new book on scepticism as part of Oxford UP’s ‘a very short introduction to’ series. I’m also developing my recent work on risk and luck, particularly with regard to epistemic risk, and I’m interested in ‘applied’ topics in epistemology, such as the epistemology of education, the epistemology of law, the epistemology of religious belief, and the epistemological implications of extended cognition. I’m the Editor-in-Chief of the online journal Oxford Bibliographies: Philosophy, and co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal International Journal for the Study of Skepticism. I am also the series editor of two book series, *Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy and Brill Studies in Skepticism. I’ve edited a lot of volumes, and also written/edited several textbooks. On the latter front, see especially What is this Thing Called Philosophy?, (Routledge, 2015), Epistemology, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and What is this Thing Called Knowledge?, (Routledge, 4th ed. 2018). I’ve been involved with numerous MOOCs (= Massive Open Online Courses), including the ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ course which was for one time the world’s most popular MOOC. I’ve also been involved with a successful Philosophy in Prisons programme. I’ve led quite a few large externally funded projects, often of an interdisciplinary nature. Some highlights include a major AHRC-funded project (c. £510K) on Extended Knowledge, and two Templeton-funded projects, Philosophy, Science and Religion Online (c. £1.5M), and Intellectual Humility MOOC (c. £400K). In 2007 I was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize and in 2011 I was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2013 I delivered the annual Soochow Lectures in Philosophy in Taiwan. My Google Scholar Profile is here. If you want to know what will eventually cause my demise, click here. Links of Interest: I was recently interviewed by 3AM: Magazine Another recent interview, this time with the Italian online journal, APhEx (PDF) The Introduction to my latest monograph, Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton UP, 2015) “Epistemological Disjunctivism: A First Pass”, the opening chapter to Epistemological Disjunctivism (Oxford UP, 2012) A fairly recent video of a talk I gave at a conference in Bonn that gives an overview of my stance on radical scepticism A fairly recent video of a talk on ‘Faith and Reason’ that I gave to a conference (aimed at a general audience) organized by the Royal Institute of Philosophy A ‘research in a nutshell’ video that I recorded a few years ago A recent blog post on ‘Intellectual Humility and Conviction’, for the Open For Debate Blog A recent blog post on ‘Farewell to Epistemic Angst’, for the Imperfect Cognitions Blog “The Value of Knowledge”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article AMA Please feel free to post questions for Professor Pritchard 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 Pritchard to our community!

The moderators of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Dr Clare Chambers, University Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. This AMA is the sixth in our Spring 2018 AMA Series; you can find more details on all of this semester’s AMAs with philosophers by going to the AMA Hub Post. You can find all of our previous AMAs over the years by going to the AMA wiki. Dr Chambers will be joining us on Monday April 16th at 12PM EDT to discuss issues in contemporary political philosophy. Hear it from her: Clare Chambers I am Clare Chambers, University Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. I am a political philosopher specialising in contemporary feminist and liberal theory. I’ve been researching and teaching at Cambridge for twelve years. I was educated in the analytical tradition of political theory at the University of Oxford, where I did Politics, Philosophy, and Economics as an undergraduate. After a year spent as a civil servant I studied for an MSc in Political Theory at the London School of Economics. At the LSE I continued working on analytical approaches to political theory in contemporary liberalism, but I also engaged in a sustained way with feminist thought, and with the work of Michel Foucault. It seemed obvious that Foucault’s analysis of power and social construction was of profound relevance to liberal theory, but l had never read work that engaged both traditions. Wanting to work on this combination for my doctorate, I returned to Oxford to be supervised by Prof Lois McNay, who specialises in feminist and post-structural theory, together with Prof David Miller, who specialises in contemporary analytical thought. The result was a thesis that later became my first book: Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (2008). Sex, Culture, and Justice argues that the fact of social construction undermines the liberal focus on choice. Liberals treat choice as what I call a “normative transformer”: something that changes a situation from unjust to just. If someone is disadvantaged liberals are likely to criticise that disadvantage as an unjust inequality, but will change that assessment if the disadvantage results from the individual’s choice. For example, women may choose to take low-paid jobs, or to prioritise family over career, or to follow religions that treat them unequally, or to engage in practices associated with gender inequality. However, our choices are affected by social construction. Our social context affects the options that are available to us. It affects whether those options are generally thought to appropriate for people like us. And it affects what we want to do. I argue that, if our choices are socially constructed in these ways, it doesn’t make sense to use them as the measure for whether our situation or our society is just. Instead we need to develop the normative resources for critically analysing choice. Most feminists understand this, and liberals should, too. Feminism is a movement that seeks to empower women, which in part means giving women choice, but it is also a movement that recognises the profound limitations on individual choice, and the way that power, inequality, and social norms shape our choices. My most recent book also combines feminist and liberal analysis and tackles a specific question of state regulation. Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State argues that the state should not recognise marriage. Even if state-recognised marriage is reformed to include same-sex marriage, as has happened in many states recently, it still violates freedom and equality. Traditionally, marriage entrenches sexism and heterosexism, and this traditional symbolic meaning has not been destroyed. And all state recognition of marriage treats married and unmarried people and their children unequally, elevating one way of life or relationship form above others. The fact that state recognition of marriage involves endorsing a particular way of life also means that it undermines liberty, especially as political liberals understand that idea. Instead of recognising marriage, the state should regulate relationship practices. Other areas that I work on include multiculturalism and religion, political liberalism and the work of John Rawls, beauty and cosmetic surgery, the concept of equality of opportunity, and varieties of feminism including liberal feminism and radical feminism. I am about to start a new project on the political philosophy of the unmodified body. Thank you for joining me here! Links of Interest: “Marriage as a Violation of Equality” - the first chapter of Against Marriage (OUP 2017). You can purchase this book with a 30% discount by going to the OUP site and using promocode AAFLYG6 at checkout Podcast interview on “The State and Marriage” “The Marriage Free State” - podcast recording and paper draft “Sex, Culture and Justice” - interview at 3:AM Magazine Multiculturalism Bites podcast interview on when intervention in peoples’ lives is justified AMA Please feel free to post questions for Dr Chambers 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 Dr Clare Chambers to our community!

The mods of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Dr Anna Alexandrova, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College. This AMA is the third in our Spring 2018 AMA Series; you can find more details on all of this semester’s AMAs with philosophers by going to the AMA Hub Post. You can find all of our previous AMAs over the years by going to the AMA wiki. Doctor Alexandrova will be joining us on Monday February 5th at 12PM ET to discuss issues in the philosophy of science, well-being, social sciences and more. Hear it from her: Anna Alexandrova I am Anna Alexandrova, currently a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College. Born and bred in Russia (a city of Krasnodar in the northern Caucasus) I came of age with the collapse of USSR, a time of hope and excitement but also fear, confusion, and anxiety. The teenage uncertainty of not knowing what it means to be kind, cool, feminine, coincided with genuine social and cultural upheavals – none of the adults around me had answers to these questions either. I spent the 1990s testing different ways to be in different places but the pull of intellectual life was always there even though it was not valued in my environment. I finally tasted that world at the London School of Economics where I did a master’s in Philosophy of Social Science. Although I had no idea what this field was initially, I fell for it almost immediately – the idea of asking whether there could be a genuine science of people and their communities fitted right into the very questions that made the 1990s so painful and so fascinating for me. I learned a lot from the course but the best part was meeting (my now husband) Robert Northcott. Among other good things together we concocted a fateful application for funding at the Open Society Institute and this is what enabled me to start PhD program in Philosophy and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. At UCSD I got the thorough and deep education that I longed for and from some wonderful teachers. Perhaps the most influential among them was Nancy Cartwright who encouraged me to stick to my guns (the guns being philosophy of social science) even as I felt professional pressure to do ‘core’ philosophy. Nancy taught me to immerse myself into a science so deeply as to be able to see philosophical problems from the inside. I remember spending a lot of time in the departments of economics and political science and overhearing condescending jokes about sociologists. This was a crucial moment that gave me a better understanding of why rational choice models were so important to economists and political scientists. They justified their feelings of superiority. My dissertation argued that although game theorists got the credit for successes in mechanism design, it was in fact the experimental economists that deserve this credit at least equally. Out of a case study on design of spectrum auctions arose a general philosophical account of the nature and role of formal models in empirical research. I believe that for too long philosophers of science have gone out of their way to show that despite their very many weaknesses idealized deductive models are nevertheless very powerful in such and such ways. It’s high time to recognise that these models play only a limited heuristic role when it comes to real epistemic goods such as explanation and stop spending our smarts on trying to justify practices that scientists often hold on to largely for reasons of power and so that they could poke fun of sociologists who don’t build models. Towards the end of my dissertation time Nancy pointed me toward a fascinating debate about measurement of happiness and well-being. Although after graduating from UCSD I was mostly publishing on economic models, the former quickly took over as my main research interest. My first teaching job was in University of Missouri St Louis, where I had generous and brilliant colleagues all around the city and where I learned most of what I know about the science of well-being. Dan Haybron of SLU, whose work on happiness I admire the most, was a big influence. I brought my philosophy of science temperament to this topic and in my recent book A Philosophy for the Science of Well-being (which I wrote after moving to Cambridge England in 2011) is not about what well-being or happiness really are, but rather about what sort of scientific knowledge it is possible to have about them. This book has both optimistic and pessimistic streaks. It is optimistic against the critics for whom well-being is too personal, too mysterious, and too complex to be an object of science. Such arguments are common throughtout history of science and should be treated with suspicion. But equally – and that’s the pessimistic bit – when well-being becomes an object of science it is redefined and this redefinition makes scientific claims about it far less applicable to individual deliberation about how to live than positive psychologists would have us believe Links of Interest: Series of posts on the science of well-being at Brains Blog “Does anyone know what mental health is?” OUP Blog “The Meaning of It All (with Anna Alexandrova)” Black Goat podcast Quick review note of A Philosophy for the Science of Well-being “Who is the expert on your well-being?” OUP Blog “Towards a Theory of Child Well-being: Podcast Interview with Anna Alexandrova” “Value-Added Science: Anna Alexandrova on value judgments and measurement of well-being” AMA Please feel free to post questions for Doctor Alexandrova 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 Doctor Anna Alexandrova to our community!

The mods of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Hilary Lawson, Director of the Institute of Art and Ideas, Founder of the HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy festival and Vice Chair of the LSE Forum for European Philosophy. Hilary Lawson will be joining us on Monday January 8th at 1PM EST to discuss issues in post-realist philosophy, metaphysics and his work with public philosophy. Hear it from him: Hilary Lawson Hi reddit, I’m Hilary Lawson - post-realist philosopher, director of the Institute of Art and Ideas and founder of the world’s largest philosophy and music festival HowTheLightGetsIn. Born and raised in Bristol, England, I was awarded a scholarship to study PPE at Balliol College Oxford . As a post-graduate I came to see paradoxes of self-reference as the central philosophical issue and began a DPhil on The Reflexivity of Discourse. This later became the basis for my first philosophical book Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament. Alongside my more philosophical writing, I also pursued a media career following my studies. Within a few years I had created my own prime time television series ‘Where There’s Life’ with a weekly UK audience in excess of ten million. In 1982, I went on to co-author a book based on the series and was appointed Editor of Programmes and later Deputy Chief Executive at the television station TV-am. Meanwhile I continued to develop my philosophical thinking and had initial sketches of the theory later to become Closure. In 1985 I wrote Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament as part of a series on modern European thought. In the book, I argued that the paradoxes of self-reference are central to philosophy and drive the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. In the late 1980s I founded the production company TVF Media which made documentary and current affairs programming, including Channel 4’s flagship international current affairs programme, The World This Week. I was editor of the programme, which ran weekly between 1987 and 1991. The programme predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in Yugoslavia and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, amongst its other laudable achievements. In the 1990s, I focused on writing Closure. It took a decade to complete and was published in 2001. The book has been described as the first non-realist metaphysics. Having begun my philosophical career as a proponent of postmodernism, latterly I became a critic arguing for the necessity of an overall framework and the need to move on from a focus on language. Closure proposes that the human condition is to find ourselves on the cusp of openness and closure. The world is open and we, along with other living organisms, are able to apprehend and make sense of it through the process of closure. I would define closure as the holding of that which is different as one and the same. Human experience is seen to be the result of successive layers of closure, which I consider to be preliminary, sensory and inter-sensory closure. The highest level of closure, inter-sensory closure realises language and thought. The theory shifts the focus of philosophy away from language and towards an exploration of the relationship between openness and closure. An important element of the theory of closure is its own self-referential character. I founded the Institute of Art and Ideas in 2008 with the aim of making ideas and philosophy a central part of cultural life. Our website IAI.tv, which posts to the sub, was launched in 2011. We then moved to publishing articles in 2013 and free philosophy courses on IAI Academy in 2014. Links of Interest: Routledge has partnered with the IAI to offer a generous 20% off all their philosophy books and a free giveaway each month. Click here for details. Tickets and lineup for HowTheLightGetsIn 2018 can be found here - discounts available for students and U25s. After the End of Truth: A debate with Hannah Dawson (KCL) and John Searle (Berkeley) on objective truth and alternative facts What Machines Can’t Do | Hilary Lawson in debate with David Chalmers (NYU) and cognitive scientist and sex robot expert Kate Devlin (Goldsmiths) on the question of machine minds After Relativism: A debate on the pitfalls of relativism and potential solutions with Simon Blackburn and Michela Massimi AMA Please feel free to post questions for Hilary Lawson 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 us in welcoming Hilary Lawson to our community!