Intellectual Life

Lilliana Mason, Johns Hopkins University Lilliana Mason is an associate professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and the SNF Agora Institute. She is the author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (2018); and co-author with Nathan P. Kalmoe, of Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy (2022). Her research […]

Governing Epistemology: Knowledge in Large-Scale Experiments   Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. He wrote two dissertations, one in the history of science and one in theoretical (electroweak) particle physics. In 1997, Galison was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; he won a Pfizer Award for Image and […]

Paper Title and Abstract: Disagreement and Meaning Philosophers often argue from premises about disagreement to conclusions about meaning. For example, from the fact that a fan of brutalist architecture who […]

Transparency, Replicability, and Integrity This workshop is based on a series of blog posts co-authored by Leif Nelson.  About Leif Nelson: Leif Nelson is the Ewald T. Grether Professor in Business […]

Hume, Sentiment and No-Fault Disagreement Hume’s celebrated essay, ‘On the Standard of Taste’ is often taken to uphold the common observation that people can disagree in matters of taste without there being any error on either side of the dispute. And Hume’s account of judgements of taste has often been taken as the basis of […]

Against Public Reason I argue that public-reason (PR) political philosophy should be rejected.  The reasons given in support of this conclusion address PR from a broader philosophical perspective than is common in this literature. In particular, I use here a general discussion of idealization in meta-normative theory (put forward in my "Why Idealize?") to shed light […]

Stories That Wrong and Stories That Repair Stories are as important as they are ubiquitous, depicting everything from the origin of the universe to the driving force behind an isolated act by a single individual. But stories do not just depict what has actually occurred—they can also exert tremendous power over what does or even […]

The Student Protests and the Failed Promise of Free Speech Maximalism on Campus Over the past decade or so, universities across the country have expended considerable symbolic and sometimes economic resources to affirm their commitment to a libertarian or speech-maximizing view of the campus as an expressive domain. They have insisted that, as educational institutions, […]

A Faithful Response to Disagreement Sometimes you encounter someone who is your intellectual equal and has roughly the same evidence you have, but who has come to a very different conclusion on the basis of that evidence. This is the setting for the peer disagreement debate. The question is how this encounter should change your […]

Authority and Control Authority – the power to decide how another is to act – is a valuable and ubiquitous tool for organizing our common life. Authority is also widely […]