Armstrong on Naturalism and Empiricism

I was reading the NPDR reviewof a recent book on the philosophy of David Armstrong. I found this review very interesting as I have been very influenced by David Armstrong myself (and have even had the privilege of auditing his course on truthmakers at the Graduate Center) though I can’t say I agree with all [...]

A Short Argument that Utilitarians Ought Not to Promote Atheism

It has been commonplace in the history of moral theory to argue that having an obligation and being motivated to fulfill that obligation come apart. I have argued that this was the conception that Hobbes and Locke had. Each of the philosophers thought that we could have obligations (even in the state of nature) but that we [...]

HOT Theories of Consciousness & and Gricean Intentions

One of the things that I am interested in is the philosophical commitments of the higher-order thought theory. Rosenthal, in my estimation, presents a viable theoretical account of what consciousness might consist in. I do not actually endorse the view; rather what I think is that the view is not obviously false. This is not [...]

So it Comes to This

Over at RC’s quick poll Genius says Well – Given this thread and given a week has passed – I suppose we can consider my curiosity satiated. To which RC responds Well, we were interested in the conditional question how others would respond if they were to carefully read all those exchanges. Since nobody bothered [...]

Computer Learns how to Read Minds

Here The amazing thing about this story is that the computer was able to correctly tell when a person was thinking about a novel word (i.e. one that it had not been trained to recognize…wow!

Did Quine Change his Mind?

It is well-known that Quine argued that the axioms of logic are revisable. The law of the excluded middle, for instance, while at the center of our ‘web of beliefs’ could, if we had compelling evidence, be revised or even abandoned. But it is commonly thought that Quine changed his mind by the time that [...]

Moral Truthmakers

I have been having a very nice discussion with the Semantic Terrorist on my post A Simple Argument for Moral Realism. I thought I would move the discussion to the front since the post was from alomost a year ago. ST gives detailed responses to the seven points I made in response to him; I [...]

Call me Crazy

They say that being crazy means repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results. Well, call me crazy ’cause even after a month of acrimonious debate and philosophical bullying from Richard C. I still think that he can be convinced by reason. Maybe after that we can work on his pompous arrogance… At anyrate, [...]

Philosophical Trends

Colin Caret over at Inconsistent Thoughts has some interesting reflections on the recent zombie wars and the influence of philosophical trends here. In the comments Richard Chappell displays his usual strident lack of understanding, myopic focus on minutia, and veiled ‘threats’ not to engage in dialogue (ohh! I feel so punished!). At any rate, he claims [...]

Cool!

Via David Rosenthal I just found out that MIT has made most (all?) of its courses in philosophy and linguistics (and others as well) freely available online. This includes lecture notes, homeworks, and practice exams…cool!