Blog Schmog
(1) Sally is a single mom and out of work nuclear engineer who goes on to learn many important life lessons in her new job as sanitation engineer (i.e. garbage man, get it?). (2) The precancerous tumour on Fred’s shoulder grows a head and tiny vestigal arms. The head just listlessly hangs to the side […]
This semester I taught John Divers’ Possible Worlds, which is a pretty exhaustive take on the pros and cons of how David Lewis’ Genuine Realism compares with varieties of Actual Realism. My only gripe with the book is that when he contrasts realism with anti-realism, the only forms of anti-realism he considers are non-cognitivism and […]
I think there needs to be more research on the cash-value of appeals to necessity. (1) Science- (1a) In science I guess to distinguish laws from non-laws (albeit I don’t know how important this really is). (1b) Mark Wilson has an article where he disproves Quine’s contention that science doesn’t need modality, but in his […]
In a forthcoming paper, Stewart Shapiro makes a lot out of the observation that goodness or badness of explanation depends in large part on the explanation’s audience. While Shapiro draws the relevant conclusions of this insight for debates stemming from Wright’s Truth and Objectivity, it has a lot of salience for meta-ethics. In particular, who […]
In the philosophy of mathematics varieties of constructivism are usually criticized because they cannot justify succesful uses of strange areas of mathematics in physics. This explanation of success is I think taken to be the main task of philosophy of mathematics. Strangely, philosophy of mathematics is never tasked with explaining when strange areas of mathematics […]
One of the strange things about pop (broadly conceived) music is that listeners have so little ability to seperate narrator from artist. For example, Johnny Cash said that many people he met thought he’d really done hard time in prison. I guess this happens to novelists who write in first person sometimes as well. Sometimes […]
"Introduction to ethics" classes are almost always actually courses on comparitive ethical theories. The theories end up being inconsistent in some cases (e.g. utilitarian theories tend, and deontological theories tend not, to support things like physician assisted suicide). "Moral Problems," or "Practical Ethics," courses tend to give arguments for all sides of hot button issues […]
Three paper-worthy ideas from Rorty: (1) there is an extreme tension between Rorty’s "Wittgensteinian" it’s-only-linguistic maneuver and his endorsement of Quine/Putnam problems with the analytic-synthetic distinction, (2) there is an extreme tension between Rorty’s critique of "invidious distinctions" and his downgrading of the cognitive status of ethics and mental talk, and (3) one can extract […]
A couple of years ago I was trapped on a beach with a guitar. Me and two other people took turns playing songs. The beachdwellers included undergraduates that wished they were still highschoolers, graduate students that wished that they were still undergraduates, and faculty members that wished they were still graduate students. It was sickening. […]
In Saul Kripke’s piece on substitutional quantification he bemoans the fact that nobody in epistemology is familiar with Montague’s paradox. We should all bemoan the fact that nobody in contemporary analytical metaphysics is familiar with Kripke’s admonitions in the piece. People who write about presentism make much of the fact that it is very hard […]