Extreme Philosophy: Bold Ideas and a Spirit of Progress

Philosophy’s value and power are greatly diminished when it operates within a too closely confined professional space. Extreme Philosophy: Bold Ideas and a Spirit of Progress serves as an antidote to the increasing narrowness of the field. It offers readers-including students and general readers-twenty internationally acclaimed philosophers who highlight and defend odd, extreme, or ’mad’ ideas. The resulting conjectures are often provocative and bold, but always clear and accessible.

Ideas discussed in the book, include:

• propaganda need not be irrational
• science need not be rational
• extremism need not be bad
• tax evasion need not be immoral
• anarchy need not be uninviting
• democracy need not remain as it generally is
• humans might have immaterial souls
• human minds might have all-but-unlimited powers
• knowing might be nothing beyond being correct
• space and time might not be ’out there’ in reality
• value might be the foundational part of reality
• value might differ in an infinitely repeating reality
• reality is One
• reality is vague

In brief, the volume pursues adventures in philosophy. This spirit of philosophical risk-taking and openness to new, ’large’ ideas were vital to philosophy’s ancient origins, and they may also be fertile ground today for philosophical progress.

Stephen Hetherington is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and former Editor-in-Chief of Australasian Journal of Philosophy. His recent books include What Is Epistemology? (Polity, 2019) and Defining Knowledge (Cambridge UP, 2022).