Blog Schmog
Lots of nice stuff here, including: a spiel for my book Garcian Meditations, some cool analytic/continental crossover material, a half-joking suggestion that logical positivism and phenomenology were really the same thing,* a defense of the positive hoopla surrounding speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy, a presentation of some of the innovations of Tristan Garcia and Graham Harman, […]
I hate to point out that I find some aspects of Robert Brandom’s philosophy to be morally rebarbative for two reasons. First, I don’t think it follows from this that he’s a bad person. I’ve never met him, but have had the pleasure to meet many of his students and I have every reason to […]
By Jon Cogburn In the spirit of Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion"* I want to begin by talking about a couple of adults, who we'll call Sam1 and Sam2. As with most unfortunate fictional actors in philosophical gedankenexperiments the world over, we shall prescribe a horrific end to both. Let Sam1 be […]
By Jon Cogburn One of Joseph Goebbels' most impressive propaganda victories involved paradoxically using widespread revulsion at the earlier stages of the Holocaust as a motor for the later stages of the Holocaust. Here's the problem. You saw a little kid screaming as his mother was being beaten bloody by a brownshirt in the town […]
By Jon Cogburn As far as I can tell, my dogs Charlie (chihuahua mix) and Leonard (wiener dog) experience the most amount of pleasure each day in the thirty or so minutes before dinner (some combination of treats, what we're eating, and dog food). From a theological perspective, I would say that behavior manifests what […]
By Jon Cogburn In his autobiographical Experience Martin Amis recounts a kind of occurrence that I wish we had an agreed upon name for (henceforth "Amis infraction"), an experience where someone does something to you based on false beliefs, but where their reaction would still be ethically unwarranted even if the relevant beliefs were true. […]
By Jon Cogburn One of the pleasures of being married to a novelist is that I get to help out with the research sometimes. One of the books that Emily is working on now concerns a couple of disenchanted Classics professors. So one of the things we've been thinking about is what could be the […]
By Jon Cogburn One of the benefits of being a philosophy professor is that there's never any trouble with playing Opposite Day with your kids. This is the game where the world has been transformed such that English (insert your language here) is now an idiolect where every sentence means "the opposite" of what it […]
By Jon Cogburn One of the epiphanies near the end of Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company involves the proper typology of neuroses. The protagonist/narrator is finally able to sustain a romantic relationship because his girlfriend convinces him that his obsessions, ticks, compulsions, and avoidances fall into three categories: Absolutely unacceptable, Endearing, To be […]
By Jon Cogburn New Criticismbegin intro here –language means on its own terms –> intentional fallacyBut these lines are not by EliotSoul making*difference and the free play of wordsBut Eliot admits that the note is bogus – Bolgan is here taking the note too seriously.LessingBurnt NortonYou wanna bet?cf. Essential is third termcf. Tradition […]