Davidson: The Myth of the Subjective 2

My initial thoughts on the paper were here. I want to delve into the arguments here. I think I finally really get Davidson after this paper and the next one (”What Is Present to the Mind?”). I was rereading this one again and suddenly, click, a lot came together. Basically it [...]

Philosophical Event-Horizons

Interesting post at GFP. The post is actually about incompatibilism. But the intro discussed Quine and the notion of an ‘event-horizon’ such that some major philosophical figure’s ideas immerse a culture so much that reading him becomes almost pointless. I want to go off on a bit of a tangent on this [...]

LDS Philosophy Blogs

Just a note on some Mormon philosophy blogs. I keep meaning to mention them.

Peirce on Intuition

I’d discussed on the weekend intuitions and whether they are trustworthy. I was using the term more as some underlying cognitive process. Over at Brandon’s post I misread him as using that usage as well. Brandon’s point was basically that an intuition is just an element in an argument and as such [...]

History of Philosophy and Charity

There is an other interesting post by Brandon up. This one is about history of philosophy and what one might call the principle of charity. The problem is when some key element of an argument is obscure. As Brandon notes ideally we should see if the term is used or explained elsewhere. [...]

More on Intuitions

I often talk about intuitions here. (Such as my discussion on intuitions and thought experiments) While I think they have their place I think it’s more a communication principle of bringing into focus issues or preconceptions that are sometimes muddled. That is I see them more in terms of pedagogy rather than [...]

Mormons and Pelegianism

Pelegianism is a topic that often comes up (especially from critics) regarding Mormonism. While I think philosophers like Sterling McMurrin vastly overstate the degree of Pelgianism in Mormonism I suspect that if you asked most Mormons a series of common questions most would tend towards Pelagian answers. Of course one problem is that [...]

Davidson: The Myth of the Subjective 1

Sorry for falling behind in the more general philosophy posts. It’s been a very busy summer and will continue to be a busy fall. I really did want to get back to Davidson. As you recall I’m going through the collections of Davidson’s more recent works starting with Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. [...]

100 Works in Philosophy

Brandon has up a post on 100 Works in Philosophy. As he says,
…a list of a hundred books, each providing a relatively accessible portal to philosophy, likely to have something of interest to a very wide range of people, in order to encourage a wider reading in philosophy, and perhaps an interest in philosophy [...]

Misc: Reading Club on Ostler

Just a few various short notes.
First off my copy of Blake’s third volume of Exploring Mormon Thought arrived. I gather there were a bunch of publishing problems including a large recall by the publisher due to bad bindings. Amazon still doesn’t sell it for some reason but they have a few [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Davidson: Knowing Ones Own Mind 2

This is a followup to my prior post on Davidson’s paper “Knowing Ones Own Mind” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Sorry for the delay. The part that is left in the paper deals with the question of “where” thoughts are. It’s an interesting question and one I’ve switched my own views on. [...]

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 [...]

Language Evolution

There’s a great post up at Science Blogs on Language Evolution. Note that linguistic or symbolic evolution (yeah the whole meme thing) is unlike regular biological evolution. That’s because there is intentionality to it. I’ve long found linguistic evolution interesting - ever since I went though the math in Royal Skousen’s Analogical [...]

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