The Problem of Extra-Semiotic Entities

I fully confess that I may be reading Derrida through too Peircean a lens. I can but say that if I do it is a fruitful way to read. Given that the following excerpt from Kelly Parker’s excellent The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought might be in order.  

Knowledge and the Dogmatism Paradox

Really interesting post up by Richard at Philosophy Etc. It’s basically about a problem regarding new evidence against something you know. If I know that h is true, I know that any evidence against h is evidence against something that is true: so I know that such evidence is misleading. But I should disregard evidence [...]

Peirce on Substance

Levi’s comments on substance in OOO I linked to earlier today got me thinking about Peirce. The issue is objects that have an effect versus those that don’t. Levi is, in his comments, getting at the distinction between having an effect and potentially having an effect I think. Peirce ends up adopting a similar distinction [...]

Peirce, Heidegger and Science

Joe Ransdell, who recently died and who started the mailing list Peirce-L, has a justly well regarded paper on Peirce as a phenomenologist. “Is Peirce a Phenomenologist?” is available online and it’s well worth reading. With regards to Husserl I pretty much agree with Joe. However I think he neglects Heidegger too much as it [...]

Vagueness

I thought I’d start getting back into the blog after a few months away by talking about vagueness. I’ve talked a lot about vagueness over the years since it is such a key concept in Peirce’s philosophy. Peirce adopts the most popular approach to vagueness by making it an epistemological issue. That is for a [...]

Representation and Causation

Bill Vallicella has an interesting post on representation and causation. Vallicella has been doing an interesting series on intentionality and physicalism. I think ultimately the problem is that many physicalists are attempting to explain intentionality in terms of a two-place logic rather than a three-place. That is to reduce intentionality to causation. Causation can be [...]

Peirce and Inference to Best Explanation

Yes, I’m still too busy to finish my Peirce and OOO discussion. Profuse apologies as I know it’s been over a month now. I did pick up Graham’s Guerrilla Metaphysics as I’m pretty convinced that’s necessary for some subtle points. We’ll see I guess. I am going off to the mountains to the north of [...]

Peirce and Things

First, I hope to finish that OOP/Peirce post this weekend. Sorry, it’s just been insanely busy for me this last week or two. The kids school started which is quite early leading to early bedtimes for me, more or less killing any evening relaxation of doing philosophy. I’ve been thinking about the subject a lot [...]

Derrida and Basic Ontology

There’s been a whole lot of discussion at the various OOP related blogs the past few days on Derrida. Most of it appears to be tied to some discussions over at Levi’s blog. Graham talks about it here and then some additional comments here. Levi then chimes in as well. There’s two interesting aspects to [...]

Gary and Peirce on Mind and Functionalism

Gary, over at Minds and Brains has a discussion of functionalism and mind. The actual topic is a debate over Metzinger’s theory of consciousness which Gary is having with various OOP critics. Now I’ve never read Metzinger and have barely dipped into OOP so I’ll wisely remain silent on those topics. However Gary wrote something [...]

Heidegger and Epistemology II

Quick quote from that thesis, “The Status of Epistemology in the Thought of Martin Heidegger,” I mentioned earlier today. Here Bartels is speaking of knowing as bringing out of concealment – an important notion in Heidegger. The idea is that knowledge isn’t merely propositional knowledge or awareness but a kind of know-how for revealing something. [...]

Heidegger and Epistemology

One thing I’ve long wondered about is how to think about epistemology. On the one hand some of the approaches to epistemology common in the analytic tradition seem a bit off to me. I’ve not gone through the details of how this affects the practical reasoning, but clearly some of the critiques that Heidegger leveled [...]

Quick thoughts on OOP

I’ve been reading Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks this week. It’s been on my “to read” list for well over a year now . I’m pretty glad I read it. I need to reread it before making any firm comments. First readings are always dangerous things and typical one misreads in key areas. My sense [...]

Pragmatism and Nihilism

Peter Lawler had an interesting post on the Civil War up at Postmodern Conservative. I’m never sure how to deal with these counterfactual investigations of major past events. So speculating on the ramifications of the South winning are hard for me. That said, clearly some low probability events happen that significantly shape history. And just [...]

More on the Prefix Paradox

I’ve been thinking a bit more about the Prefix Paradox from the other day, as I don’t think I really put into words well my objections. First, I think when considering it one ought distinguish between belief, assertion, and judgment. The most interesting aspects of the “paradox” are in my mind the epistemological ones. And [...]

keep looking »

Quote of the Moment

Search

Try Amano Chocolate
First American Gold Medal Winner
at the
London Academy of Chocolate

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Archives

Blogroll

Admin

Unique Visitors