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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
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The concepts, legacies and afterlives of thinkers.
Don Ihde, the founder of postphenomenology, died in 2024, three days after his ninetieth birthday. The memorial conference held at Stony Brook, and the discussion that followed it, suggest that his theory of mediation has acquired an unexpected currency in the age of artificial intelligence.
The sharpest critic of moral philosophy in the last quarter of the twentieth century put the same objection to utilitarianism and to Kantianism alike: both estrange a person from his own life. The notions of 'moral luck' and 'one thought too many' were born there.
John Searle, one of the most argued-over figures in the philosophy of language and mind, died on 17 September 2025 at the age of 93. The thought experiment at the centre of the AI debate is still his.
The philosopher who set the intellectual direction of post-war Germany died in Starnberg on 14 March 2026. President Steinmeier spoke at the memorial service in Frankfurt.
Jürgen Habermas
The author of After Virtue died in 2025 at the age of 96. His thesis that the modern moral vocabulary is a heap of unintelligible fragments is still being argued over.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Sir Anthony Kenny, the English philosopher known for his work on medieval philosophy, Aquinas and Wittgenstein, died on 3 August at the age of 95. A former Master of Balliol College, he was best known for his four-volume history of philosophy.
Anthony Kenny
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Immanuel Kant looks for the measure of moral rightness not in consequences but in the principle of the act. The three formulations of the categorical imperative, and why they are still argued about.
The Genealogy does not set out to refute morality; it reminds us that morality has a history. Master and slave, ressentiment, bad conscience and the ascetic ideal — and the long afterlife of the method, from Nietzsche to Foucault.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The allegory of the cave in Book VII of the Republic sets out the difference between knowledge and appearance. Why it is invoked so often in arguments about screens, algorithms and information.
