Contemporary Philosophers — Philosophers News

After Virtue at forty-five: MacIntyre's diagnosis read against 2026

Alasdair MacIntyre died in May 2025 insisting that modern moral argument is interminable because the words outlived the world that made sense of them. His diagnosis in After Virtue, the disquieting suggestion, emotivism, Nietzsche or Aristotle, the wait for another Benedict, reads differently in a year of shouting. Here is what holds and what does not.

Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche

Culture Desk9 October 2026

Contemporary Philosophers

Varoufakis's technofeudalism and the claim that it is still capitalism

Yanis Varoufakis says capitalism is dead and that 'cloud capital' now extracts rent from digital fiefs rather than profit from markets. We set out the technofeudalism thesis as an argument to be tested, then weigh the strongest objections from Morozov, Snow and Gane, and Varoufakis's 2026 reply to his Marxist critics.

David Harvey, Karl Marx, Shoshana Zuboff

Newsroom3 October 2026

Contemporary Philosophers

Tu Weiming and the case that you need not Westernise to modernise

The Chinese-American philosopher Tu Weiming has spent sixty years pressing a single claim: that to become modern a society need not become Western. This profile sets out his idea of 'cultural China', the Boston Confucians, and his attempt to revive Confucian humanism as a living philosophy, and asks whether it holds.

Tu Weiming

Culture Desk1 October 2026

Contemporary Philosophers

Hitoshi Nagai and the question of why I am me

Almost unread in English, the Japanese philosopher Hitoshi Nagai has spent forty years on a sentence that looks like a grammatical slip: why am I me? We explain his singular 'I', how it differs from solipsism, and why Anglophone philosophy of mind mostly declined to ask the question.

Thomas Nagel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hitoshi Nagai

Newsroom30 September 2026

Contemporary Philosophers

Robert Stalnaker's common ground and the machines that borrow it

A fifteen-page paper from 1978 modelled conversation as the narrowing of a set of live possibilities. In 2026 the vocabulary turns up in AI research on whether chatbots grasp the unsaid. We set out Robert Stalnaker's theory, and the care needed before saying a language model 'tracks common ground'.

David Chalmers, Robert Stalnaker

Newsroom29 September 2026

Contemporary Philosophers

Jacques Rancière and the argument he has made five times

Archive research, pedagogy, political theory, film and literature: across sixty years Jacques Rancière has restated one claim in five different materials. Equality is not a destination but a premise, and politics is the moment someone demonstrates it. The claim has costs, and his critics have named them precisely.

Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Louis Althusser

Newsroom16 September 2026

Contemporary Philosophers

Miranda Fricker made epistemology moral, and then moved on

Her 2007 book gave the world 'epistemic injustice', a phrase now used by health regulators and courts. The deeper achievement was to show that knowing has a moral structure. As her Dewey Lectures open at Columbia on 30 September, Fricker is working on blame, apology and forgiveness instead.

Elizabeth Anderson, Miranda Fricker

Newsroom15 September 2026

Contemporary Philosophers

Daniel Dennett and the long audit of our explanations of mind

Daniel Dennett died on 19 April 2024. The obituaries called him the man who explained consciousness. His actual project was narrower and more useful: sorting the explanations of mind that do scientific work from the ones that merely feel like explanations. The quarrels that followed are still running.

Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett

Newsroom14 September 2026

Contemporary Philosophers

David Harvey at 90, and the theory that capital produces space

For half a century the Marxist geographer has argued one thing: capital does not simply move through space, it builds space, and it escapes its own crises by rearranging what it has built. From Haussmann's Paris to the data centres of rural Louisiana, an assessment of the idea and of what it cannot do.

Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey

Newsroom13 September 2026