Blog Schmog
By Jon Cogburn I forget in which book of Primo Levi's that he recounts learning Russian from the soldiers that liberated him from Auschwitz. Weirdly, the surviving prisoners were brought by train back into Russia and then at the end of the war had to find their way back to their home countries. If I […]
By Jon Cogburn The internet was invented for basically two things: (1) sharing pictures/videos of cute animals, and (2) kvetching. I understand and celebrate this, and as a result feel a little bit guilty about using it to engage in meta-kvetching. If we kvetch too much about other people's kvetching, we are thus subverting the […]
By Jon Cogburn I know why lawyers are unhappy. You have to be pretty smart to get through law school and then the job is mostly unrelenting drudgery sometimes percolated with backstabbing your colleagues on the way to the top. I know why neurosurgeons are unhappy. Human beings are not built for medical school and […]
By Jon Cogburn In his wonderful textbook, Philosophies of Art: A Contemporary Introduction, and canonical book on the aesthetics of horror, The Philosophy of Horror: or, Paradoxes of the Heart, one finds Noël Carroll over and over again making an argument that goes like this. Preliminary – Present in the most charitable possible manner a putative […]
By Jon Cogburn In AN EARLIER POST I generalized Evans' original argument against ontic vagueness to suggest a counterargument to those onticists who would respond to Evans by defending vague objects without vague identity. Here I want to do something similar, but aimed at semanticists who argue that vagueness lies in our representations of objects, […]
By Jon Cogburn In this post on Harman on Žižek on Bryant I mentioned some of my work on in my forthcoming EUP book on Tristan Garcia. I've put some of this into a draft of a paper I'll be giving at the Southwest Undergraduate Philosophy Conference this Saturday. Anyhow, the paper is HERE at academia […]
By Jon Cogburn Slavoj Žižek has a characteristically interesting criticism of the version of object-oriented ontology in Levi Bryant's The Democracy of Objects HERE. Graham Harman shares some preliminary thoughts HERE. Harman is currently writing a book on critics and commentators of object-oriented ontology called Skirmishes. It's currently slated to cover Tom Sparrow, Steven Shaviro, […]
By Jon Cogburn In Michael LaBossiere's post on H.P. Lovecraft's racism he considers and critiques three arguments attempting to exculpate Lovecraft: (1) that his racism was unremarkable for a person of his time, ethnicity, and class, (2) that he had other qualities that offset the racism, and (3) that Lovecraft was an all purpose hater […]
By Jon Cogburn Some chunk of the facebook discussion about my post earlier today on Kant consisted in explaining basic facts of Kripke and/or Kant to me that I'm already familiar with and that moreover seemed at least to me besides the point.Yes I know there is a difference between empirical and pure intuitions. Yes […]
By Jon Cogburn [Update: Please see Nick Stang's "Did Kant Conflate the the Necessary and the A Priori." Stang argues against one of my key claims, but (in addition to advancing it) his paper shows really well what the debate is in the secondary literature.] I'm not a historian of philosophy and I only know […]