From the category archives:

Philosophy

Intuitions

February 14, 2010

From Christopher Shea at the Boston Globe:
[A]t the website Experimental Philosophy, a professor at the City University of New York, Wesley Buckwalter, presents evidence that men and women intuit different conclusions when faced with the same sets of facts.
[...]
Buckwalter goes on to make a much broader argument: Perhaps one reason for the dearth of professional female [...]

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Roderick Long on Ayn Rand

January 20, 2010

Over at Cato Unbound, Rod Long commences “The Winnowing of Ayn Rand.” Rod seems to sign on to and endorse the eudaimonist interpretation of Rand’s ethics, natural teleology and all. But (as anyone who followed Unbound’s corporatism issue will know), Rod thinks historical capitalism is corporatist by nature and that the non-aggression principle implies that [...]

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What’s Living & Dead in Ayn Rand’s Moral & Political Thought?

January 18, 2010

That’s the topic of this month’s Cato Unbound. If you answer “nothing” to either half of the question, feel free to move right along. For the rest of you, Doug Rasmussen’s lead essay contains some really interesting questions (in addition to some really interesting analysis). Here’s his first question. What do you say?
What is Rand’s [...]

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Hanson on the Philosophers’ Poll and Moral Realism

December 14, 2009

Robin Hanson looks at the recent poll of philosophers and finds “On only 2 of 30 topics was I strongly tempted to disagree with professionals.” Robin is of the opinion that aesthetic value is subjective, while philosophers on the whole tend to say it is objective. His other divergence from the balance of philosophical experts?
Meta-ethics: [...]

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Philosophy Poll

December 13, 2009

Bryan Caplan posts some of the results from a recent poll of philosophers (in which I think I participated.) I’ve indicated my opinions below in bold text, just in case you give a damn. Of course, I don’t agree with the way the options have been broken down in some of the questions. In [...]

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Why Are There So few Women in Philosophy?

November 10, 2009

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 [...]

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On Celestial Teapots and FSMs

January 29, 2009

Good quick hit from Michael Drake:
Shorter Ross Douthat: Comparing belief in God to belief in theCelestial Teapot is absurd, because it’s like comparing a belief only some people know is absurd to a belief everyone knows is absurd.
Click though for a longer argument addressing the charge of intolerable glibness.

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Some Reflections on Leiter’s Insult

October 12, 2008

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 [...]

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Blame It on Gerald Dworkin for Blaming It on Ayn Rand

October 11, 2008

My apologies to Brian Leiter for crediting him for the guilt-by-free-association “Blame it on Ayn Rand” post that appeared on his blog. It was written by a different professional philosopher, Gerald Dworkin, who has replied on Leiter’s blog with some interesting dictionary reading. Leiter does think the “point in the original post was apt,” so [...]

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Contingency + Love = No Regrets?

June 17, 2008

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 [...]

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The Courage to Conjoin

July 18, 2007

Ramesh Ponnuru writes:
What renders atheism incompatible with a coherent account of morality, when it is incompatible, is physicalism (or what is sometimes described as reductive materialism). If it is true that the universe consists entirely and without remainder of particles and energy, then all human action must be within the domain of caused events, free [...]

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Thoughts on Rorty

June 13, 2007

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 [...]

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Stephen Stich: Quote of the Day

February 2, 2007

“The idea that philosophy could be kept apart from the sciences would have been dismissed out of hand by most of the great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. But many contemporary philosophers believe they can practice their craft without knowing what is going on in the natural and social sciences. If facts are [...]

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Sullivan’s Meaninglessness about Meaningfulness

February 1, 2007

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 [...]

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Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

January 2, 2007

I took a huge number of metaphysics courses during grad school and, over time, I changed my mind about pretty much everything, other than my dogged commitment to the law of non-contradiction. Then I stayed stuck, because, of course, I eventually landed on the correct answers. I thought the NYTM article on free will was [...]

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Can You Be Wrong Aboout How Happy You Are?

November 21, 2006

I accept a more or less functionalist account of the mind, according to which mental states are individuated by their functional role in the economy of cognition and behavior. I also believe in the possibility of what is sometimes called the “Cartesian Fallacy,” the assumption that our own mental states are transparently accessible to consciousness. [...]

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Shew Fly, Shew

March 23, 2006

I came into my office this morning and discovered a fly trapped in my Nalgene. It can’t find its way out. What can this possibly mean?

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What Are Philosophers Good For?

February 4, 2006

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 [...]

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de Jasay and Smartification

December 20, 2005

If you haven’t read Anthony de Jasay’s The State, then do. (“What would you do if you were the state?”) There is a class of books that I like to call “smartifying.” That is, you are actually smarter after reading them, by which I mean you can think better about a set of issues and [...]

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The Hayekian Family

December 12, 2005

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 [...]

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Mises & The Yogi

November 16, 2005

This one’s for my homies over at The Austrian Economists.
As Julian just pointed out to me the other day, Mises says that praxeology, the logic of human action, may not actually apply to all humans. Buddhists, for example, our Schopenhaurian pessimists.
Some philosophies advise men to seek as the ultimate end of conduct the complete [...]

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Dennett on ID

August 29, 2005

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 [...]

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ID, Aliens, and Pointlessness

August 26, 2005

In an actually useful HuffPo post, Michael Shermer discusses intelligent design, offering an updated version of Philo’s objections in Hume’s Dialogues. Namely, if the best explanation of various phenomena is design, then we require a theory of the designer. And the best theory may simply be a committee of super-intelligent but fallible aliens. Which, clearly, [...]

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Paglia v. Philosophy

July 14, 2005

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 [...]

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Shermer, Volokh, Evolution, & God

June 16, 2005

Eugene Volokh comments on this passage from a Michael Shermer post:
In March of 2001 the Gallup News Service reported the results of their survey that found 45 percent of Americans agree with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” while [...]

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