Jerry Fodor, in a review in the London Review of Books of Galen Strawson’s Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, opens the review with an ascerbic observation. I quote: Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour)…
Friedrich Hayek must rate as one the greatest intellects of the twentieth century. I take the view that his achievement is on a par with his cousin – Wittgenstein. Most people know Hayek for his political philosophy, philosophy of economics, philosophy of social science and philosophical jurisprudence. The distinctive and unifying thread across all Hayek’s thought was…
EPISTEME IV, the fourth annual conference attached to EPISTEME: A Journal of Social Epistemology, took place this past week. The conference’s theme: testimony. Jennifer Lackey put together a superb program comprising some seasoned veterans and some very talented youngsters. We were sorry that Linda Zagzebski couldn’t make it – there were flight delays due to…
I have been struck by the number of posts that are tagged in WordPress blogs as “philosophy.” Given that philosophy is a central interest of mine I naturally have tag surfed “philosophy” from time to time. It has been somewhat of a disappointment to find, even on the most charitable of interpretations, that much of what is classed as…
Update This issue is scheduled to appear in the Autumn of 2008. All accepted papers will subject to the usual refereeing process. The contributors: Leonard Angel (Douglas College) Lynne Baker (UMass Amherst) Matthew Day (Florida State) Joel Krueger (Copenhagen) Leslie Marsh (Sussex) Teed Rockwell (Sonoma State) Mark Rowlands (Miami)
The new issue of EPISTEME is now available. As you will see, this is a cracking issue with some stellar contributors. For details and abstracts see Project Muse This is the companion issue to Part 1, still available as a freebie here Given the well-known and talented contributors EPISTEME is consistently attracting, this is another…
So-called “political correctness” (PC) is an oxymoron: it posits a metric, the implication being that there is an objective standard being referred to, which of course is being rejected in the first instance by PC’s inherent relativism. Radical social constructionism in its attempt to reject essentialism (race, gender, nationality, class, and so on) through the…
(Note: references are incomplete). Plato’s simile of light – the images of the Sun, the Divided Line and the Cave are outlined in the Republic at the close of Book VI and at the beginning of Book VII. The simile of light has attracted a vast literature from Nettleship’s Victorian lectures, down through the work…
I This well-worn question needs to be re-analyzed into the following three subsidiary questions. First, for what reasons did the government (i.e. the organs of state, broadly speaking, the emperor, the senate, officials, and provincial governors) persecute? Secondly, for what reasons did ordinary pagans (i.e. the general populace) demand persecution? Thirdly, we need to examine…
It’s been ten years since a snappy and provocative paper by Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) audaciously burst upon the philosophical scene. Given that the paper had been rejected three years earlier by three major journals (Chalmers 2008, 42), it must surely have come as an enormous surprise to the authors that a veritable…
manwithoutqualities 