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True or false quiz
Once upon a time, in an otherwise empty universe, there were two notebooks, a fox, and a little prince. The fox clawed at some mud with its paws (oh yeah – there was some mud, too) and filled the first...
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Potted plants vs. forests
Neal Gabler, over a year ago, in the NYT: The post-idea world has been a long time coming, and many factors have contributed to it. There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an...
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McDowellian idealism
A colleague of mine took pity on my flailing about in the churning waters of idealism and recommended that I read some John McDowell. Though I try to read a lot, I always find myself astonished at...
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Ruh roh!
From John McDowell, Mind and World (1994), pp. 77-78: It can seem that we must be picturing the space of reasons as an autonomous structure – autonomous in that it is constituted independently of...
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What philosophers do
The following is an excerpt from an essay I’m working on, meant to explain to non-philosophers what it is philosophers do. Philosophy is the search for wisdom, and wisdom has two large components: what...
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Storm
My filmmaker brother sent me a link to this YouTube. As a complete coincidence, I also had the chance to talk today to my dear friend Rick, the poet and godscourge, who could well have written...
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Taking out Hume’s appendix
Just returned from the Central APA which was wonderfully and surprisingly rejuvenating. In the past I have found such conventions numbing, but this time – and maybe ’twere just my ‘tude – I found a lot...
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A. E. Housman was a wise man
(taken from Kronman’s Education’s End) The pleasures of the intellect are notoriously less vivid than either the pleasures of sense or the pleasures of the affections; and therefore, especially in the...
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Living under a boundless sky
I was rooting around today in an old zip drive and found an initial attempt at what I presented several years ago upon being promoted to professor. I ended up delivering something weirder (see here),...
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Rise (and Aeschylean failure) of the guardians
Last week my family watched Rise of the Guardians. The idea is that there are guardians on Earth who preserve important ideals: Santa Claus (wonder), the Easter Bunny (hope), the Sandman (dreams), and...
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On Kantian philosophy, part 1: Kant’s project (in the CPR)
As the title of this post suggests, I’m intending to write several posts reflecting on Kant’s philosophy. I’m doing this because I have a distant goal of writing a book arguing that Kant was...
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Kantian philosophy, part 2: why be interested
In part 1, I gave a quick description of Kant’s epistemological project: to uncover what might be called the human “operating system,” or the fixed interpretive framework humans employ in encountering...
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Kantian philosophy, part 3: from thin to thick Kantianism
The central claim in Kant’s philosophy is that our experience is somehow formatted by the nature of our understanding. Why think this is so? In part 2, I made a general case for thinking that humans...
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Book review: why the Enlightenment still matters
Book review by Ollie Cussan of Pagden, The Enlightenment and why it still matters, in Prospect: The Enlightenment’s great achievement, Pagden argues, was to repair the bonds of mankind. Its distinctive...
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From Jacques Barzun to his grandson
Recalled here: “When you have worked through it, by further reflection and some decision as to the immediate future it will turn into something like a path marked on a map, to be followed for a good...
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Kantian philosophy, part 4: whether our fixed paradigm is natural
In the previous posts, I’ve been pursuing the idea that our ability to understand experience – interpret it and offer explanations and justifications – requires making a Kantian move: we should...
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Kantian philosophy, part 5: what to do about space
The invention or discover of non-Euclidean geometry really messed up philosophers’ claims to apriori knowledge. For centuries, philosophers were sure that claims like, “The angles of a triangle are...
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Philosophical progress?
David Chalmers recently addressed the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge, and he jokingly announced at the beginning that everything he was about to say was not to leave the room. Of course, there are...
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Illness, enlightenment, salvation: on al-Ghazali and Deutsch
Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) was a Persian mystic philosopher, and wrote the Deliverance from Error as a kind of intellectual autobiography, while at the same time an argument for sufism. (A student gave me...
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How the internet, and computers generally, impart education
Answer: by not working very well. I’ll explain. My son spends a lot of time playing Minecraft. It’s a brilliant game that operates in two modes: creative mode, in which you can build all sorts of...
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