New Philosophy Substacks

Some people you might be interested in!

A spectre is haunting Substack — the spectre of writers without credentials, like me and Bentham's Bulldog, stealing jobs and readers from real philosophers, like Richard Y Chappell and Pamela Anderson.

Fret no longer. An exciting new wave of philosophers has joined Substack.

Today, I thought I’d tell you some of their names:

1. Elise Woodard: Woodard is a philosopher at King’s College London, who works on epistemology, ethics, and social & feminist philosophy. I first read her stuff when writing my undergrad thesis on a topic related to consent, which she has a number of excellent papers on. Her newly launched blog only has two posts so far, but they’re both about consent and sexual ethics — so if you read me because you’re interested in sexual ethics (or hate my writing on sexual ethics, and wish you could read someone better), I suspect you’ll get a lot from her blog. (If you want to read more of Woodard’s academic work, check out her website here; my two favourite papers from her are “Epistemic Atonement” and “Mistreating Consent”.)

2. Michael Hannon: Hannon — a philosopher at Nottingham — has a blog about political epistemology called The Politics of Truth . My favourite article so far has been “Is There Truth in Politics?”, which is about whether broad-brush normative statements about politics (“Trans women shouldn’t compete in women’s athletics”, “Brexit was bad for Britain”, etc.) have a truth value. (Btw: Hannon and Woodard also co-authored a book this year — Political Epistemology: An Introduction. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the reviewers say it’s fire.)

3. Daniel Muñoz: Muñoz is a philosopher at UNC Chapel Hill, and his blog hits the sweet spot between smart-brained and funny. If you read my review of Jordan Peterson’s Christianity book and thought it unduly harsh, you might like to know what Muñoz thinks about Peterson’s books.

4. Gideon Futerman: Gideon is the smartest person I’ve met in person. His blog is about AI-risk, longtermism, and other EA-adjacent topics.

5. Shaun Miller: Miller subscribed to me earlier today, so I found out about his blog in the nick of time. Miller is a sexual ethicist at Iona University. His dissertation was on the ethics of sex education, and he has papers on BDSM practices and sexual consent. His first five posts are on something called “compersion”.

6. Victor Kumar, who I’ve followed on Twitter for a while, joined Substack fairly recently — a few viral bangers later, his blog is doing very well. Kumar is a philosopher at Boston, who mixes moral philosophy with cognitive science. His most popular post is “The Left’s Intellectual Crisis”.

7. Nigel Biggar: Biggar — a Christian ethicist at Oxford — is the only unambiguously conservative writer on this list. I imagine most of my readers are somewhat left-of-centre, but a well-curated Substack feed should be intellectually diverse. (Aside: I met one of my many, many, many ex-girlfriends (so many) while reading Biggar’s What’s Wrong With Rights? a public bench. “It’s so good!”, she said of the book. Soon, it transpired that she hadn’t read the book herself, but had just seen her dad reading it, who told her it was good. Major red flag, ick ick ick.)

8. Rebecca Lowe: Rebecca might count as a ‘conservative’ too (maybe she’d call herself a classical liberal? Maybe both?) Her blog contains regular updates on what she’s been reading each week, plus long and interesting interventions on topics like euthanasia, utopia, and, her favourite, space travel. (She is also based on insects.)

9. Greco & Wansley: the joint effort of Daniel Greco (philosopher at Yale) and Matt Wansley (Law professor at Cardozo), this blog is high-key excellent: read them on Mill’s trident, Bayes’s dirty secret, and the capitalist alignment problem.

10. Daniel Rubio: Rubio — a philosopher at Toronto Metropolitan University — is one of my favourite philosophers of religion. The best philosophers of religion (Graham Oppy, J. H. Sobel, Richard Swinburne, Brian Cutter, etc.) are clued in on other, more fundamental areas of philosophy too, and Rubio fits this mould. Like Rebecca, Rubio keeps his readers up to date with what he’s reading, as well as writing longer articles about the multiverse, free speech, and infinite ethics.

11. Andrew Sepielli: Sepielli is a metaethicist at the University of Toronto who started his blog this June. See his essay on plea bargaining.

12. Oak: a Maths/Phil undergraduate at Oxford, Oak is unfortunately very smart. Equally unfortunately, or maybe not, she was kidnapped by Timothy Williamson, who gave her a Williamson brain-transplant. As a result, when you ask for her opinion on something — ice cream, knowledge first, the weather — she lights up, waves her arms, and exclaims: “Well T- T- Timothy Williamson says—!”. It is probably just a phase, or maybe not. Read this post about how autistic she is.

13. Kenny Easwaran — a philosopher at Irvine — just launched a blog which is called, *vomits in shoe*, Pragmatist Positivism.

14. Kyle Star: I don’t know anything about this writer, but he also writes about Santa Claus, and I enjoyed his takedown of Rohan Ghostwind’s extremely low-IQ essay about why rationalism is bad because your mother.

15. Harry Chalmers: a philosopher at Brown, Chalmers mainly blogs about why monogamy is immoral. Read his takedown of me.

16. Kyle York: Chalmers’ arch enemy, York believes monogamy is fine. I hosted a debate between the two of them, which you can watch on YouTube here. York is a PhD student at CU Boulder. Read his one, lonely post about our lonely place in the universe.

17. Sophie Nelson: Nelson is a PhD student at NYU, who works on issues related to consciousness. Read her helpful taxonomy of answers to the mind-body problem.

18. Galen Strawson — need I say more?

19. Pete Mandik: Mandik is a well-known philosopher of mind at William Patterson University of New Jersey. He also does his own illustrations. Read Mandik on what physicalists should say about Mary’s Room.

20. Barry Lam: a philosopher at UC Riverside, Lam is the producer of one of the best philosophy podcasts of all time, and certainly the one with the best production. See his post on PhD pro(scams), and his podcast series on David Lewis.

I’ve definitely missed a ton of great people. I encourage you to shout yourself out — or shout someone else out — in the comments (unless you are literally Hitler)!

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