Issue 31: March/April 2001

EDITORIAL

News: March/April 2001

Plato-approved city rises from the rubble • Quine and Anscombe die • Scientists create mice with ‘human’ brains • Aussie philos leave the country

FOOD

Do You Really Know How to Cook?

Lisa Heldke sticks up for the pastry chefs against Plato and the physicians.

Philosophy & Food

Are we what we eat? Feast your mind on the next few articles, says this issue’s editor Jeremy Iggers, philosopher and restaurant critic.

Philosophy Regains its Senses

Ray Boisvert describes the disdain which many philosophers down the ages have had for food, and the dire consequences this has had for their philosophy.

ARTICLES

Intelligent Design: a Catechism

How did life on Earth come about? Recently the buzzword among those dissatisfied with Darwinism has been ‘Intelligent Design’. But isn’t this just another name for Creationism? Not so, argues Todd Moody.

Kant and the Thing in Itself

Ralph Blumenau on why things may not be what they seem to be.

Preference Satisfaction and the Good

Michael Philips wonders what you really, really want.

The Philosophers’ Ship

In 1922 Lenin sent Russia’s best philosophers off on a cruise and told them not to come home unless they wanted to be shot. Alexander Razin and Tatiana Sidorina describe a ‘humanitarian act’ by a totalitarian regime.

The Reproductive Psychology of Inanimate Objects

Edward Ingram thinks your television is manipulating you.

Why Should I Care About Morality?

Arnold Zuboff keeps asking a dangerous question – whether anyone has any real reason to act morally. He thinks it has led him to a new basis for ethics.

Georg Hendrik von Wright

by Yujin Nagasawa

OBITUARIES

Elizabeth Anscombe

by Duncan Richter

Willard V. Quine

by Paul O’Grady

INTERVIEWS

Peter Singer

Peter Singer is a Professor of Bioethics at Princeton. Notorious for his views on issues such as euthanasia, he is also revered as a founding father by the animal rights movement. Jeremy Iggers asked him about the treatment of farm animals and about his own strict vegetarianism.

LETTERS

Letters

More Theology, More Falsification • Miraculous Coughs • Too-Many-Worlds Interpretation? • Death or Freedom? • Warhol Was First! • What is it Like to be You? • Is Philosophy Enough? • Idle Speculation

COLUMNS

Dear Socrates

Having returned from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the Twenty-First A.D., Socrates has eagerly signed on as a Philosophy Now columnist so that he may continue to carry out his divinely-inspired dialogic mission.

Right by Definition

by Joel Marks

Issues