Edouard Machery, “Philosophy Within Proper Bounds” (Oxford UP, 2017)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jun 15, 2018 · 1h 2m

There are five people on the track and a runaway trolley that will hit them, and you are on a footbridge over the track with a large person whose body can stop the trolley in its tracks. Should you push the large person to his death to save the five on the track? Using hypothetical cases and questions about them to elicit judgments is a prominent method of analytic philosophy to discover modal or necessary truths – truths about what must be the case. The method is used to consider what action is right, whether free will requires the ability to do otherwise, whether knowledge requires…