An article in the NYT on Simon Critchley’s latest book.
Archive | January, 2009
Dead Philosophers
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PhilPapers
Another great online service (a companion to MindPapers) has been brought to fruition by David Chalmers, David Bourget and Wolfgang Schwarz.
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Liberal Education
Stanley Fish in the New York Times blog invokes Michael Oakeshott in considering the debate between education seen in purely instrumental terms vs. education as having intrinsic value as an introduction into the postulates of our culture. Only the other night I caught a news item where everyone was talking in terms of a university education increasing the earning potential (even though the figures are hotly contested). Talk of an education was conspicuously missing.
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Extended Mind Thesis Enters Mainstream
Science journalist Carl Zimmer writes about the extended mind thesis in the latest issue of Discover. Whatever one might think about the Clark-Chalmers argument, Zimmer offers a well-needed corrective to the recent rash of articles on the supposed baneful effect of technology upon our cognitive depth.
Our minds are under attack. At least that’s what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?) Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. Last summer the cover of The Atlantic posed a question: “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Inside the magazine, author Nicholas Carr argued that the Internet is damaging our brains, robbing us of our memories and deep thoughts. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world,” he wrote, “it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”
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George Feaver
It is only recently that I learnt of the passing of George Feaver, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at UBC. He was great bar-room company who could, very articulately and with such aplomb, talk the hind legs off a donkey. Indeed, I recall one time when he had to be “pulled” off the podium because he’d barely covered the introduction to his paper in the allotted 40 minutes. I have a fond memory of having dinner with him in the mountains overlooking Colorado Springs, both of us feasting at one of the greatest meat restaurants I’ve ever been to, washed down by some fine red wine, with George holding court – as he was apt to do - talking animatedly of his intellectual passions and colourful private life. I’ll miss your company George!
If anyone can tell me more about his life and his work, that would be great. The last I heard he was in Texas researching Maurice Cranston’s papers. I’d be interested to see his obituary as listed here if anyone would care to send it to me.
George in full flight – 2006
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Latest Oakeshott Release from Imprint
The latest in Imprint Academic’s Oakeshott suite is now available – Vocabulary of a Modern European State Essays and Reviews 1953-1988. The table of contents and preface can be found here and Luke O’Sullivan’s editorial introduction can be found here.
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Steps to a “Properly Embodied” Cognitive Science
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Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl
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Epistemological Problems of Privacy and Secrecy
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Science, the Market and Iterative Knowledge
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The Goldilocks problem and extended cognition
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Is external memory memory? Biological memory and extended mind
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Brain (call) box
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A liberal arts education
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In Praise of Reason
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The Zombie Within
