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A nice aggregator of blogs dealing with OOO. It's only problem might be that a few blogs are pretty prolific and don't only deal with philosophy.
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Sherlock Holmes and mathematics. The recent movie, not the books.
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Do you really learn from lectures? (I never did – I have much preferred the professors just hand out their lectures)
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What can neuroscience teach us about evil? My favorite bit, Will Wilkinson says that the recent Slate article “confirms my impression that neuroscientists think the ability to fabricate colorful and misleading technicolor pictures of brains license them to philosophize with impunity.”
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Heidegger, realism, and OOO Very nice post. I'm still working through Harman. I favor the "hyper-realist" readings of Derrida and Heidegger regardless of whether they are the thinkers own. The too speculative nature of OOO makes me pretty uncomfortable though.
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Chris H. has a blog up on theory, culture and Mormonism. We're ideologically pretty separated (he's a liberal, I'm conservative, he's a neo-Kantian of sorts ethically whereas probably Levinas and Derrida come closest to my ethical views to the degree I have any) Still I always enjoy my discussions with him.
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Russell Fox responds to that hack job on Mormons in Harper's. Also a response at the Deseret News.
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Only 15% of scientists at major universities think there is a conflict between science and religion. I'm actually surprised it's that low. I guess the New Atheists have been less persuasive than it appeared. More surprising was that a majority saw both science and religion as "valid avenues of knowledge."
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More on faster than light neutrinos from the ever wonderful xkcd.
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Scientists can now safely sequence the genome of a fetus. Should they? I'd say yes but I can understand why some anti-abortion people might disagree. It's interesting since we chose not to get the Down Syndrome test on our children since of course we'd not abort had we discovered the disorder.
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More Entries

Academic Freedom

I tend to think that academic freedom as idealized is a big myth. I found this comic today that seems to express part of my view. (The other part being all the politics at many universities)

Experimental Philosophy and Free Will Needs a Makeover

Very interesting post at Flickers of Freedom arguing that the way intuitions are dealt with in the free will debate is problematic. Incompatibilists do not simply assert that the truth of their conclusion. They develop (often ingenious) ways of revealing the threat of determinism to free will and MR. In doing so, they certainly appeal to [...]

Fate vs. Free Will

From Bill Watterson: It’s amazing how much my son is like Calvin. The only difference is no imaginary friends or stuffed animals. Other than that he’s a dead ringer…

Options & Alternative Possibilities

Philosophical Pontifications has up a post on whether options are the same as alternative possibilities. I think we have to distinguish the ontological from the physical issues. However I think our common linguistic concepts are designed to pick out the physical issues but not the ontological ones. Put an other way I think our instincts [...]

The Root Cause

Kevin Winters sent this to ldsphil and I thought it was funny enough to pass along.

Clarifications

I had a philosophy professor who said that 90% of any philosophical debate was coming to an understanding of the language being used in the debate. That is many disagreements are semantic in nature. This isn’t just an appeal to the linguistic turn in philosophy. Just that in discussion connotations and tangents often confuse and [...]

Revisionist Accounts

I wanted to finally get to the discussion of revisionist accounts of responsibility. I want to start though by getting some preliminaries in order. For one what do we mean by revisionist theories? I take to to be the claim that our general understanding of some theory is in order and needs to be revised. [...]

Responsibility, Ignorance and our Duty

Sorry to keep harping on the free will debate. I know some aren’t interested. I should have some other posts coming as well as the much promised post on revisionist accounts of responsibility. I sort of wanted to get a lot of this out of my system so I could think about other things. I [...]

Quickly – Peircean Generals

I’d written a big post on Peirce’s view of Generals and Universals. After finishing it I decided it just was way too technical and got into too much of Peirce’s metaphysics. So instead of expounding on Peirce’s theories let me offer a brief outline of a cosmology that I think works. I don’t want to [...]

Detecting Chance

I wanted to make clear why I can’t accept Blake’s view that Libertarian Free Will (LFW) is detectable against chance in the universe. I don’t think I’ve really communicated well what I see to be the problem.

Free Will Origins & Critiques

I want to get to my oft promised discussion on revisionist accounts of responsibility. I think it’s important though to first set the stage by looking at what is going on at a fairly low level. So if you don’t mind let me set up these issues for those not as familiar with the literature. [...]

Heidegger vs. Levinas

I’ve read a reasonable amount of Levinas but am anything but a Levinasian. (And the Levinasians love to let me know that) I do think that how I approach philosophy (and Heidegger) is quite influenced by Levinas though. Having said all that it always seemed to me that Levinas’ criticisms of Heidegger were a bit [...]

Metaphysics of Agent Libertarian Free Will

I think it would be convenient for further discussion on the free will issue to lay out a bit of what I take to be the metaphysical requirements for currently defensible accounts of Libertarian Free Will. (LFW) I’m here simply ignoring theories, such as Kane’s Event-Libertarian Free Will, that have had significant criticisms which don’t [...]

Mormon Free Will Redux

I’ve not posted on free will for a while. (My last main posts were on responsibility and foreknowledge, time and chance, and then Mele II) Over at New Cool Thang there was a discussion about free will that got me thinking about it again. So let me summarize some of the conclusions I’ve reached in [...]

Schelling, Heidegger, Freedom

Not strictly Heidegger but worth reading (and I think ultimately reflective of Heidegger’s own philosophy)

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