Books:

Book cover for Philosophy in a Technological World

Philosophy in a Technological World:

Gods and Titans

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Philosophy has come to seem like a specialist interest with little or no influence on our lives. On the contrary, argues James Tartaglia, it was the philosophy of materialism which taught us to turn from the gods to seek practical assistance from the titans, thereby reversing the moral of an ancient Greek myth to inspire the building of today’s technological world. As the largely unreflected belief-system it has now become, materialism continues to steer the direction of technological development, while making us think this direction is inevitable. By drawing on neglected idealist traditions of philosophy, Tartaglia argues for a new way of looking at reality which asserts our freedom to choose, reaffirms and builds upon our ordinary, everyday understanding, and motivates us to convert technological innovation into a process driven by public rationality and consent. With discussions ranging from consciousness, determinism and personal identity, to post-truth culture, ego-death and video games, this clear and accessible book will be of wide interest.

Book cover for Philosophy in a Meaningless Life

Philosophy in a Meaningless Life:

A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality

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This book provides an account of the nature of philosophy which is rooted in the question of the meaning of life. It makes the case for believing that this question is neither obscure nor obsolete, but reflects a quintessentially human concern to which other traditional philosophical problems can be readily related, allowing them to be reconnected with natural interest, and providing a diagnosis of the typical lines of opposition across philosophy’s debates. Tartaglia looks at the various ways philosophers have tried to avoid the conclusion that life is meaningless, and in the process have distanced philosophy from the concept of transcendence. Rejecting all of this, Tartaglia embraces nihilism (‘we are here with nothing to do’), and uses transcendence both to provide a new solution to the problem of consciousness, and to explain away perplexities about time and universals.

Book cover for A Defence of Nihilism

A Defence of Nihilism

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Nihilism has received a grossly misleading press, in our view. Far from being a problem that needs to be overcome, we will argue that it is an insightful and morally anodyne philosophical outlook on the world; one which allows us to take a cosmic perspective on our lives without making religious presuppositions. As such, our objective in this short book will be to rehabilitate nihilism’s public image. If we can achieve this, we think a significant barrier of misunderstanding between religious believers and atheists will have been removed.

Book cover for The Meaning of Life and The Great Philosophers

The Meaning of Life and The Great Philosophers

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This book reveals how great philosophers of the past sought to answer the question of the meaning of life. It contains thirty-five chapters which each focus on a major philosophical figure, from Confucius to Rorty, to imaginatively engage with the topic from that philosopher’s perspective. This volume also contains a Postscript (‘The Blue Flower’), co-written with Stephen Leach, on the historical origins and original significance of the phrase ‘the meaning of life’.

Book cover for Nihilism and the Meaning of Life

Nihilism and the Meaning of Life:

A Philosophical Dialogue with James Tartaglia

Complete Text

Ten philosophers reflect on Tartaglia’s Philosophy in a Meaningless Life. Contains the author’s replies and a new essay entitled 'Nihilism and the Meaning of Life'.

Book cover for Consciousness and the GreatPhilosophers

Consciousness and the Great Philosophers

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This book addresses the question of how the great philosophers of the past might have reacted to the contemporary problem of consciousness. Each of the thirty-two chapters within this edited collection focuses on a major philosophical figure from the history of philosophy, from Anscombe to Xuanzang, and imaginatively engages with the problem from their perspective.

Book cover for Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers

Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy:

Early Philosophical Papers

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This volume presents a selection of essays which Richard Rorty wrote during the first decade of his career (1961-72). The introduction examines Rorty's philosophical development during this period.

Book cover for Richard Rorty: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers

Richard Rorty:

Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers

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A four-volume survey of Rorty scholarship, with the articles organised by theme. Contains my essay ‘Are Causal Pressures part of the Way the World Is?’

Book cover for Rorty & The Mirror of Nature Alternative cover for Rorty & The Mirror of Nature

Rorty and the Mirror of Nature

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Explains Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), chapter by chapter; contains plenty of criticism, too.

Journal Papers & Book Chapters:

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The ethnophilosophy debate in African philosophy has been primarily concerned with the nature and future direction of African philosophy, but I approach it in search of lessons about philosophy in general. I show how this ongoing debate has been obscured by varying understandings of “ethnophilosophy” and that a de facto victory has long since transpired, since “ethnophilosophy”, in the sense I recommend, is flourishing. I argue that the political arguments with which Hountondji and Wiredu initiated the debate in the 1970s supervene on the metaphilosophical view that ethnophilosophy, if philosophy at all, is of a poor standard. Showing that ethnophilosophy must indeed be philosophy, I argue that the critics’ low opinions of it depend on unrealistic assumptions about how philosophy makes progress. I conclude that Africa is lucky to have ethnophilosophies and that the rest of the world should hope to develop some.

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I begin with a defence of both Gyekye’s universalist and African metaphilosophies. In light of these metaphilosophies, I discuss the contemporary Western hegemony of materialist philosophy of mind and its origins in Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949), showing that the existence and nature of the traditional Akan philosophy, as elaborated by Gyekye, casts serious doubt on some influential founding motivations for materialism. I then argue that traditional Akan philosophy is best aligned with contemporary idealism. Gyekye’s endorsement of dualism is shown to have not been intended as ontologically fundamental, while panpsychism is rejected on the basis of the resistance it offers to the Akan commitment to transcendence. Contemporary idealism, however, is able to accommodate all the main components of traditional Akan philosophy, making both experiential primacy and transcendence central to a metaphysical understanding of reality. Sunsum (spirit) and ōkra (soul) are understood in terms of the distinction between the phenomenal and horizonal conceptions of experience, with consciousness always requiring a distinction between the phenomenal world within an experiential horizon and the independent being that transcends the horizon.

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The article addresses the issue of free will and determinism through a discussion of Newcomb’s paradox, presented as a dialogue between the spirits of Lady Luck and Fate. I argue that commitment to determinism, which is suggested by materialist metaphysics, is in contradiction with our experience of freedom of choice. Newcomb’s paradox describes the dilemma of choosing between either one or two boxes in order to maximise the quantity of money these boxes contain, which has been determined by the machine predicting what your decision will be. The character of Heather, faced with this dilemma, symbolizes humanity grappling with the issue of free will in the face of determinism. I claim that our experience of freedom prevents us from believing that determinism is true when we properly reflect on the issue, just as Heather could not believe in determinism when she had to make the choice in the situation described in the paradox.

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I begin by clarifying Tallis’s revisionary terminology, showing how he redraws the lines of the traditional debate about free will by classifying himself as a compatibilist, when in standard terms he is an incompatibilist. I then examine what I take to be the two main lines of argument in Freedom, which I call the Mysterian Argument and the Intentionality Argument. I argue that neither can do the required work on its own, so I ask how they are supposed to combine. I then argue that a commitment to the ontological priority of everydayness, of the kind suggested in chapters 5 and 6 of Freedom, might combine the arguments in such a way as to secure Tallis’s conclusion. I conclude that the argument of Freedom requires positive metaphysical commitment of a kind Tallis has yet to provide.

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This dialogue was produced by an email exchange, with each email limited to 200 words. The exchange took place between 21 January and 9 June, 2021. No edits were allowed once ‘send’ had been pressed and there was to be no other correspondence between the participants for the duration of the dialogue. The Call for Papers for this special issue of Human Affairs was the starting point and there was no other pre-planning.

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Written in 2018 (while I was working on Gods and Titans), I try to explain Rorty’s awkward combination of pragmatism and materialism by reference to his views on technology.

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Written in 2015 (just after Philosophy in a Meaningless Life), I take a very hard line on Rorty’s position on consciousness, as well as the various materialist trends that inspired it.

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Written in 2015, I take a fresh and more critical look at Rorty’s  Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, following my 2007 treatment in Rorty and the Mirror of Nature.

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In this paper, I reject illusionism (eliminative materialism) and defend the idealist theory of consciousness to be found in Philosophy in a Meaningless Life and  Gods and Titans. I had to squint to say that my theory was itself a kind of non-materialist illusionism, but did so to fit the occasion (a symposium on illusionism). Illusionism, the most hard-line and evidently untenable of all materialist positions on consciousness, is the only consistent materialist position on this issue, in my view. Illusionism is important because it clearly shows what is wrong with materialism.

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A defence of my generalist conception of philosophy, according to which the subject is held together by the meaning of life – this issue is ‘the keystone of philosophy’, as I put it in Philosophy in a Meaningless Life.

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A development of my opposition to philosophers telling people how to make their lives more meaningful.

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Rorty took some of his main ideas from Kant, despite the fact that he was generally opposed to Kantianism in all its forms.

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Thaddeus Metz’s Meaning in Life (2013) has become the main inspiration for philosophers who want to side-line the traditional issue of the meaning of life and instead focus on using conceptual analysis, guided by thought experiments, to try to find a formula for how to live a maximally meaningful life. I regret the stroppy tone of this piece, but it does bring out some fundamental flaws to any project of this kind – irresolvable ones, I think, although the project continues unabated.

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The existence of non-Western philosophy is a problem for Rorty’s conception of philosophy, and indeed, the whole of his project. I look at his evasive attempts to side-line this issue.

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This is the paper I should have published when I finished my Ph.D. in 2001; I did try with its ancestors, but the journals weren’t having it. It is the materialist theory of consciousness I defended in my Ph.D., back when I was struggling to understand how materialism could possibly be true. I gave up in 2004 when I realised that materialism isn’t true. The fact that I published this paper so long after the event was entirely due to career pressures, produced by the quantity of time I spent working on  Philosophy in a Meaningless Life – time which was invisible from the perspective of my CV. It is now best construed as a thought experiment: what is the best that can be done with materialism? The position presented here ultimately collapses into eliminativism, for reasons I explain in chapter 4 of Philosophy in a Meaningless Life.

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I think it does. The best, most succinct statement of this problem, together with the social context that lends the issue interest, is to be found in chapter 8 of  Gods and Titans.

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This was my first attempt to link J.J. Valberg’s Horizonal conception of consciousness with virtual reality. I continued with this theme in chapters 7 and 8 of  Gods and Titans.

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This is my earliest treatment of the generalist conception of philosophy later defended in Philosophy in a Meaningless Life. The fact that philosophy exists in a conceptual space between religion and science strikes me as one of its greatest sources of contemporary social significance, one which is currently being largely wasted.

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I defend and develop Hilary Putnam’s objection that Rorty’s philosophy undermines itself.

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Rorty thought that neither consciousness (experiential feel) nor intentionality (experiential direction) could provide ‘the mark of the mental’, i.e. something which explains why mental states are grouped together and contrasted with the physical. In this paper, I argued that only the notion of introspection can do the job.

Magazine Articles:

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Many in the 20th century abandoned idealism. James Tartaglia now advocates for a revival of metaphysical idealism, arguing that it is misunderstood and often unfairly dismissed by the scientific establishment. By clarifying common misconceptions, Tartaglia reveals how idealism could offer significant social benefits, encouraging a more philosophical society and one focused on the primacy of experience. His new book Inner Space Philosophy: Why the Next Stage of Human Development Should Be Philosophical, Explained Radically (Suitable for Wolves) comes out on the 28th June 2024.

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The repeated emergence of metaphysical idealism—the notion that reality is experiential in essence—across cultures, geographies and history should be explained not in terms of its cultural motivations, but its plausibility as a correct account of nature, argues Prof. Tartaglia in this scholarly but very accessible essay.

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Following their shock split in 2021, many music fans are now left to discuss the enduring legacy of Daft Punk. The duo, defined by their robot masks and pounding electronic beats, certainly blazed a trail within the music industry. Yet few of us understand quite how their legacy transcends the realms of synthesisers and vocoders. In this article, James Tartaglia explores the metaphysics of Daft Punk, and how their work can serve to lead us down a new, idealist, understanding of the world.

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Since art’s inception, we have always found ways to arbitrarily limit its scope. As there’s been no agreed definition of art, the most popular answer to the question: ‘is it art?’ is ‘who cares?’. This, argues James Tartaglia, is a mistake. Articulating a response to this question is crucial for the development of our culture, the livelihood of many artists and understanding new artistic breakthroughs in the virtual world.

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Should VR become ultra-realistic?

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A Defence of Nihilism.

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The All Music Guide to Jazz is essentially a massive collection of short reviews of jazz albums, with each one given a star rating. You can look up an album you know to see if you agree with the reviewer, perhaps being pleasantly reassured, perhaps being pleasantly outraged – that they only gave two stars to that one, for example. You can use the book to look up an album you heard about on the grapevine to see if you think it is worth a listen, or browse to discover new ones. In format and function, it is very similar to the Halliwell’s Film Guide . Philosophy could do with something like that. It would cause plenty of outrage, of course – the jazz and film ones do too – but it would help to open up the field and might improve it. The time-investment involved in reading a philosophy book is far greater than listening to a jazz album or watching a film. If some were of the opinion that this trivialised philosophy, their books arguing that case could be reviewed too.

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This piece is about teleportation (see chapter 7 of Gods and Titans); the title comes from a jazz composition by Charles Mingus.

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Steve Leach and I did a lot of research to find the historical origins of the phrase ‘the meaning of life’. This is a popular version of the essay that resulted, ‘The Blue Flower’, which was published in The Meaning of Life and the Great Philosophers (and is linked from the entry for the book on this website). However this magazine version does contain some interesting extra material that didn’t make it into the main essay, suggesting that perhaps the phrase originated with Goethe rather than Novalis.

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No, we are not – that’s the short answer.

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This is about the distinction between the meaning of life and the question of how to give our lives social meaning (meaning IN life).

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