World Science Festival featuring Bobby McFerrin, best known as the writer and performer of one of my favourite songs Don’t worry be happy. Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? Join host John Schaefer, Jamshed Barucha, scientist Daniel Levitin, Professor Lawrence…
Lecture 1: A Scrutable World Handout Slides Draft MS of Constructing the World Lecture 2 (12th May): The Cosmoscope Argument Lecture 3 (19th May): The Case for A Priori Scrutability Lecture 4 (26th May): Revisability and Conceptual Change: Carnap vs. Quine Lecture 5 (2nd June): Hard Cases: Mathematics, Normativity, Ontology, Intentionality Lecture 6 (9th June):…
Once again, this bit of Onion satire was brought to my attention by my chum David Livingtone Smith.
Jesse Norman, a very able philosopher and man of practice, has been elected as the new MP to represent the Hereford and South Herefordshire constituency. Philosophically speaking, Jesse has several strings to his bow. I first came to know him as an Oakeshottian – he edited The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott (Duckworth – unfortunately, no…
Here is a chapter from a book by Michael Dawson, Brian Dupuis, and Michael Wilson (all of the Biological Computation Project, University of Alberta) that has just come my way and is entitled From Bricks to Brains: The Embodied Cognitive Science of LEGO Robots. In fact, all the chapters in draft are freely available to be downloaded…
We love stories as much as we need them, but a funny thing has happened to departments of literature. The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology and worse prose that goes by many names but can be summed…
Here’s another review of Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind (Do also check out Rob Rupert’s critical notice here). It helps that Mirko, the blog author, has as his advisors, Andy Clark and Julian Kiverstein. Mirko is also working as co-translator of Supersizing into Italian. Great stuff – this guy is going places.
Here’s a new book on Oakeshott by Edmund Neill. Heretofore I haven’t come across Neill’s work but if Noel O’Sullivan says he’s OK, I guess that’s good enough for me. Two quibbles. First, it falls within a series entitled Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers – I thought that by now we’d gotten past these unhelpful Procrustean…
A month to go until EPISTEME ’10.
Here’s an interview with André Kukla plugging his book (see above) from 2006 (which I’ve only just come across). I know Kukla through his technical philosophical work: two titles remain vivid to me. Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science and Studies in Scientific Realism. The former was a well-needed tough-minded antidote to the vulgar relativism…
manwithoutqualities 