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 [...]

Truth vs. Truth

I was listening to Dreyfus’ existentialism lectures on my drive home. He was discussing the two traditions that make up the western tradition. The first was Greek and basically was what we’d term absolutism and the traditional categories of philosophical thought (epistemology, ethics, ontology). In that tradition truth is correspondence between thought [...]

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 [...]

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.

Am I a Physicalist?

Blake accused me of being a physicalist in the comments from yesterday. I just wanted to clarify why I feel this is quite wrong and explain my own position.

My Ethics Philosophy

My view of ethics came up in the other thread. I wanted to clarify my position since so many appear to have drawn erroneous ideas about it. I’ll be the first to admit that I am fairly skeptical of most ethical writings in philosophy that I’ve read. For a wide variety of [...]

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 [...]

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