Philosophy

My old prof Peter Carruthers shares some thoughts. Here’s one of his hypotheses:

Philosophers use the language of “argument” a lot. We tell our students that philosophy is all about learning how to distinguish good arguments from bad arguments, that philosophy will increase their ability to argue well, and so on. But the word “argument” does [...]

What really bothered me about Leiter’s gratuitous crack at my competence to talk productively with philosophers on Bloggingheads TV (which he later softened) was his apparent assumption that somebody else would be talking to all those philosophers if I wasn’t. But I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t have the sense that I’m simply [...]

Bryan Caplan’s argument in his post on “Parenthood as the Trump of All Past Regret” proves both too much and too little. The general form of the argument has nothing to do with children, but applies to anything contingent one has come to value highly. Bryan’s argument has the same form as this: “If I [...]

There is no better way to memorialize a philosopher than argue with him. So here’s a bit from one of the only things I ever wrote about Rorty, from a 1999 Institute for Objectivist Studies online seminar. This, I think, would have been my first year in the PhD program at Maryland, so please keep [...]

Andrew Sullivan publishes an intelligent letter from a reader on how Sullivan and Sam Harris are talking past each other — Harris talking about truth, Sullivan talking about meaning — and suggesting that they refocus and take this issues head on.
I, personally, as an atheist, find meaning in my own possibility and will to act [...]

Here are a few thoughts about what I’ve learned from interdisciplinary research.
The more interdisciplinary investigation I do, the clearer it becomes that different disciplines have quite different standards for evidence and argument. Some very traditional analytical philosophy papers on happiness (or whatever) are next to useless, so thoughtless are they, despite their impressive dialectical [...]

One of the thinest spots in the classical liberal corpus is the role of the family in a free society. Steven Horwitz steps up to offer us “The Functions of the Family in the Great Society.” [pdf]
ABSTRACT. Criticisms by Hodgson and others that Hayek and other Austrians cannot offer a theory of the family are [...]

Daniel Dennett’s NYT essay on intelligent design is spot on from beginning to end. If you’re confused about this issue, this is the place to go.
Dennett concludes:
Since there is no content, there is no “controversy” to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on [...]

Camille Paglia attempts to explain the absence of women in the BBC’s ridiculous philosopher popularity contest.
I feel women in general are less comfortable than men in inhabiting a highly austere, cold, analytical space, such as the one which philosophy involves. Women as a whole – and there are obvious exceptions – are more drawn [...]