Fodor on Natural Selection

I am back from Philly. I had a veggie-cheese steak and saw the Liberty Bell. As for the SPP, it seemed to be doing quite well. I missed the first day of the conference, which I was bummed about. I wanted to see Devitt’s talk on ‘The “Linguistic Conception” of Grammars’. From what I know [...]

I’m Outta Here!

I am off today to the Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting in Philly where I will present Language, Thought, Logic, and Existence as a poster. I likely won’t get to the comments for a couple of days….but then again, that is an empirical matter!  

The Empirical Justification of Mathematics

Things have been quite around here lately, mostly because I have been lost in GTA IV and finishing my dissertation. Well I am making some progress (on both ) and so will try to get to some of the comments around here. In answering the comments on the Refutatioin of Rationalism I started thinking about [...]

71st Philosophers’ Carnival

Here I wonder if there are any good arguments against rationalism in this issue?

The Refutation of Rationalism

I am back from my vacation in Liberty City Seriously though, gta 4 is a lot of fun and very addictive! I have recently been very interested in showing that rationalism is hopeless. To be open, I confess that I used to be a rationalist when I was younger. When I first started studying philosophy [...]

Einstein and the a Priori

Tanasije has recently offered up Einstein as an example of how empirical science is dependent on a priori knowledge. His point seems to be that once Einstein had his two fundamental principles (i.e. the principle of relativity and the principle of the constancy of the speed of light) he was able to use ‘pure reason’ [...]

Philosophers’ Carnival

Here Better late than Never!

Not as a Means Only

In an earlier post I argued that the categorical imperative entails that we are not allowed to use sentient beings as a means only. The semantic Terrorist challenged me on this (and other things) and argued that I couldn’t really mean it. But I did, and I still do. But what does it mean to [...]

The A Priori Argument against Rationalism

In a series of earlier posts I have been giving an evolutionary argument against rationalism. In the course of doing so I have appealed to Devitt’s abduction argument. But I also think we can give an a priori argument against rationalism. That is, an argument to the effect that the empirical method is the only [...]

Valid but not in Virtue of Form?

Some remarks of the Semantic Terrorist in the post on moral truthmakers got me to thinking. Here is what he said. consider the following argument which is easily proven to be invalid despite the fact that many analytic philosophers would mistakenly classify it as valid: 1) George Bush is a bachelor. ? George Bush is [...]