I've noticed that there is a real paucity of good philosophical or more technical oriented blogs out there. There's no shortage of occasionally updated political blogs or blogs recounting recent events. (Heavens, I even did the later years before "blog" was a term) But for technical stuff the pickings are much slimmer. My all-time favorite blog was This Week in Mathematical Physics. But that sadly is defunct. (Although I still go to it to look stuff up)
In Mormon circles Times and Seasons has some very good threads but they are intentionally not that technical. Let Us Reason raises a lot of good themes as well. I'll plug my brother's blog MoBlo as well. His isn't philosophically oriented but does tend to delve into close readings of the Book of Mormon that somehow manage to be practical as well. Dave over at Dave's Mormon Inquiry raises a lot of issues as well. The old faithful of more faithful intellectualism was Metaphysical Elders. But that is largely defunct with Times and Seasons taking its place.
I've tried to put up in my sidebar a reasonable selection of resources and links. I think I have good introductions to most of the philosophical issues I tend to touch upon regularly. The one thing I've had troubling finding though were other philosophical sites. I've found a few forums, but they tend to be drowned out in "noise" by people not really interested in real philosophical discussions.
Given this lack, despite frequent googling, I thought I would put up a list of a few of the blogs I found that were interesting. Not necessarily interesting because I agree with them - after all sometimes reading something very disagreeable is far more interesting and informative than those you agree with. In no particular order, a few other blogs.
AndrewSW: Not that technical that regularly, unfortunately. But some interesting takes on issues. Still it has a fairly good layout and some interesting topics.
Orange Philosophy: A blog by a bunch of grad students at Syracuse University. They're putting up online mp3s of famous philosophers as a project. They also have some interesting topics and articles. Not a lot just yet. But then school's out right now.
This is Not the Name of This Blog: Bad name. Right up there with WINE standing for Wine is not an emulator. (For those Slashdot readers tired of Linux fanatics) It's an other grad students page - this time for the University of Rochester. Not a lot of stuff, but some good links, including how to put logical symbols into your HTML. (Yes, that will work in our comments here as well)
Fake Barn Country: One of the better philosophical blogs. Like most, this is a blog for and by grad students. This one at the University at Brown. Updated fairly regularly with interesting topics and comments, this is one of my favorites. (Perhaps other grad students could do this? Hint. Hint.
Ektopos: An other great one that is updated fairly regularly. It has a bit of a psychological vibe too it. But I'll not hold that against them. Lots and lots of excellent links to other sites as well. Perhaps this is one of the blogs I'd like to be more like.
Sadly, that's about it. Any suggestions for good blogs are always in order. Of course an other good source is Weatherson's "blog" of recent papers in philosophy with an apparent focus on philosophy of science. As I said, I a lot of the links I have in the sidebar are potentially very interesting. So check out a few of them.
Update: Thanks to Matthew (below) I found Ektopos' list of other blogs. I went through most of them and picked out those that are mainly about philosophy and which are still active. (i.e. a few posts over the last month or so) There are others there so check the others out if you are interested. In the meantime here are the other ones I found interesting.
Close Range: A rather interesting blog focusing in on analytic philosophy with an emphasis on language. I actually spent a fair bit of time reading through the articles. Probably not everyone's kettle of fish. But I enjoyed it.
Mumblings of a Platonist: A bit more "general" of a blog than I normally include, but she has some close readings and discussions of various Platonic dialogs that I always find interesting. Plato is that philosopher everyone returns to eventually. Whitehead said that philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Plato. (Or words to that effect) I'm not sure that's true, but perhaps I'm just biased to Heraclitus. In any case Plato's one of those guys you always learn something from when you read.
Philosophy, et cetera: How can you go wrong when someone writes out the latin for etc.? He also has an entry on the nominalism vs. scholastic realism debate. My kind of topic. I've always thought the medievals were the most neglected of all philosophers. I'd say the Renaissance philosophers since they were neglected even more. But they didn't really achieve that much interesting philosophically. They were more important for moving from Scholasticism to preparing the way for the modern era ushered in by Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, Galileo and others. (Which isn't to say they ought be neglected - most of their names no one knows)
Parablemania: A philosophy blog with a bit of a focus on Christian apologetics. The author is a Calvinist from what I can tell. So he's definitely on the far spectrum from Mormons. Still I liked his comments on Armenianism. In the comment section someone brought up that basically criticisms of Calvinism reduce to not buying the idea that God both determines the future and we are free. Yet that is a premise they hold as a matter of faith. (Well, words to that effect anyway) In a way that's even more radical than people who are compatibilists. The old free will vs. determinism debate is a popular one on LDS-Phil. I believe that there are some strict compatibilists who believe that a robust free will is compatible with foreknowledge. So I suppose we can't fault the Calvinists too much. But I admit that I'm among those who have a very hard time accepting the Calvinist perspective.
Opiniatrety: A philosopher up at the University of Utah. I don't know if he is Mormon or not. Not as interesting as some of the others but he does have a few good posts.
The Hanged Man: An other interesting one although I confess I've not read it closely. Still the entry about Fodor's criticisms of pragmatism was pretty interesting.
The Leiter Reports: A bit more news about the politics and events within philosophy departments than a focus on interesting philosophical ideas. It too has a discussion of Fodor on pragmatism though.
Wo's Weblog: Some interesting comments on indeterminism and some good technical comments on epistemology. This appears a pretty interesting blog. I confess I've not had time to read through it a lot though.
BTW - while I didn't mention them, there are various e-zines that are available on the net that are quite good. The Catholic oriented First Things and Ars Disputandi are two great ones. SMPT has Element, its e-zine although I believe Ben plans for issues to only be available for paying members. (That's the Mormon philosophy association - the link is in my sidebar)
Actually truth be told, I'm just posting a comment to ensure comments from articles whose name has spaces in it work. I just thought I'd post a real comment rather than a bunch of gibberish I'd delete later.
I think that Rochester's title (This is Not the Name of This Blog) is supposed to be paradox forming. Think of the liars paradox.
Ektos should be Ektopos. Glad you like the site! Any psychological vibe is due to me linking articles that I think have implications for philosophy of mind. Of course that's not really my area so I may go amiss at times. There are 69 philosophically oriented blogs in Ektopos' web link section and 47 in our blog aggregator. Of course you can increment those by one since I’ll now be adding your site. You might be especially interested in Russell Arben Fox’s blog Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg (http://philosophenweg.blogspot.com/). Russell is an LDS philosopher who’s AOS (I think) is political philosophy.
Thanks Matthew. I'll update the name. (Sorry - I wrote the above late at night while working on python scripts for the site) Russell isn't really maintaining his site that much and doesn't put much philosophy in it. So I took it off my sidebar. He does post on Times and Seasons regularly though.
I'll go through some of the sites Ektopos links to and see how many are active or deal with meaty philosophy. Thanks again.
Thanks again for the links, Clark.
The view I hold is standard compatibilism. I'm not sure why you think it's more extreme than that, and I can't really imagine how you could be more extreme than that. It seems binary to me. Determinism and freedom are compatible, or they're not.
Also, I don't hold to compatibilism as an article of faith, if you mean by that that I don't have arguments for it. I have both philosophical and biblically-based arguments, and I've given them on my blog. It is a crucial element of standard Calvinism, so if that's what you mean by calling it an article of faith then that's right.
Opinatrety is not a blog by a Mormon, as far as I can tell. He's in fact quite liberal on moral issues in ways I wouldn't expect a Mormon to be. I believe he has mentioned being in Mormon country a few times on his blog. If he's got a search engine on the blog, you could search for key words like 'LDS', 'Mormon', 'Mormons', etc.
Thanks for making an appearance Jeremy. By article of faith I tend to me that the primary reason for holding it is due to your religious views. A Mormon for instance, might be more open to rejecting absolute foreknowledge and thus may not have that imperative that Calvinists do. That there are arguments, I hope I didn't deny. However wouldn't you agree that the arguments are more of the nature of apologetics than prima facie reasons to hold to compatibilism? It would seem that, outside of religious commitments, that the most "natural" or "easy" view would be to adopt either freedom or determinism with little reason to adopt compatibilism.
I should hasten to add that I know of many Mormons who are compatibilists. Ben Huff has provided various arguments for it on LDS-Phil. However most Mormon philosophers appear to move in the direction of rejecting determinism.
The reason I called it more extreme than simple compatibilism is the role of God's intents. One can be a determinist without necessarily thinking God determines things. However "extreme" was meant more in a Mormon context. Clearly as figures like Leibniz show, your position is anything but extreme in the history of philosophy. For Mormons to say that God determines our action is to imply a causal relationship which moves beyond mere determinism. That is the result of the different place God holds for us in our cosmology, given that we reject ex nihlo creation.
Hope that clarifies things.
I ( http://www.andrewsw.com ) found you through my referrer logs. Honestly, I'm always open to feedback.
"not that technical that regularly unfortunately"
I'd be more technical more regularly if I knew people wanted it - and if I knew that I knew what they meant by technical or regular. I'll endeavor to become more aware of your interests, but I can only do so much without feedback. Fortunately, linking is feedback.
Just to clarify, it wasn't really a criticism than what I was looking for. I read a lot of blogs that aren't focused on technical philosophy. But I was interested in technical oriented philosophy.
Just to confirm--I (proprietor of Opiniatrety) am not LDS (Jewish with preference for Reconstructionism, if anyone cares). The occasional posts on LDS issues are inspired by being in Utah, but I'm moving to Milwaukee in a couple of weeks, so there probably won't be many more of those. Thanks for the link, anyway! I'll try to post more interesting philosophy after I move.
Also, check out Certain Doubts (http://bengal.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts), an epistemology group blog run primarily by Jon Kvanvig at the U of Missouri.
i just want to say i like your site !
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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