Rupert Reviews Rowlands/Interview with Shapiro
These two items via Ken Aizawa’s blog. 1. Rob Rupert reviews Mark Rowlands’ latest 2. Ginger Campbell interviews Larry Shapiro (check out the companion episodes Ginger mentions)
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Moral Worth and Inclinations in Kantian Ethics
Check out my chum and occasional collaborator Chris Onof’s paper Moral Worth and Inclinations in Kantian Ethics just published at Kant Studies Online. There are few philosophers around today that write with such exacting precision, such intimacy with their topic and with such philosophical breadth that Chris Onof does.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature – 30 years on
I chanced upon this freely available review of Rorty’s notorious PMN (30th anniversary edition). It reminded me that I’d read PMN long before reading Oakeshott and that coming across Rorty’s invocation of Oakeshott’s conversational metaphor had no resonance for me. Even though I’m not in sympathy with Rorty and Oakeshott’s relativism I’m amazed at the…
Merleau-Ponty
My visit to Merleau-Ponty’s grave coincided with the 50th anniversary of his death. It was Andy Clark who first brought Merleau-Ponty to my attention (Phenomenology of Perception) in his seminal book Being There, the latter, for me at least, one of those books that presented a seismic shift to my thinking. My interest in M-P is in his…
Experience and Its Modes
I chanced upon this online version of arguably my favourite philosophical book. The opening paragraph should be something every student should read and have posted above ones desk: An interest in philosophy is often first aroused by an irrelevant impulse to see the world and ourselves better than we find them. We seek in philosophy…
David Rumelhart (1942-2011)
Stanford University News New York Times I Programmer Rumelhart was enormously important in the 1980s in reviving this neural network approach to language and cognition Steven Pinker
Derek Parfit: On What Matters
Derek Parfit’s latest book On What Matters is about to hit the shelves. I guess this must qualify as a major philosophical event if like me you were taken by the astounding philosophical imagination of Reasons and Persons. Below is a shot of Parfit at his dashing peak taken in Oxford by the late Susan…
Broken Window Fallacy
The topic of economics is not within my usual ambit (I do retain a tangential epistemological interest) but it’s certainly timely and Steve Horwitz always brings an astringency of good sense (however unfashionable that might be) to the knee-jerk economic issues of the day. Because of my passionate interest in New Orleans Steve’s thesis has…
Doing things with music
Two items of note (at least for me) from the excellent Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences: great to see this journal flourishing. I recall a correspondence with an eminent emeritus professor of philosophy at McGill around 2000 who nearly had a coronary when I told him of my interest in phenomenology (he’s still with us…
Stigmergic Simulations
Here are some terrific stigmergic simulations by architectural student Yang Chenghan that I chanced across: The first is a 3D simulation deploying 45-70 agents (source code) The second a 2D simulation deploying 20-30 agents (source code) Here are some great synthetic stigmergic stills Yang has created.
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