Newly Discovered Draft of Descartes’ Meditations
H/T to Stephen Hicks. Write-up in Research Frontiers. Bernard WilliamsDescartesJeremy HymanMeditations on First Philosophymodern philosophy
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Why Philosophers Are Obsessed With Brains in Jars
An old philosophical chestnut discussed in The Atlantic. Words and concepts used by a brain in a vat can’t be meaningfully applied to real objects outside of the brain’s experience, because the ability to have causal interaction with the specific things that words name is inherently how such words acquire meaning, Putnam argued. Artificial intelligenceCognitive…
Who was the first modern philosopher?
Steven Nadler reviews Grayling’s latest. anthony graylingAristotleChristianityDavid HumeDescartesleibnizmodern philosophyPhilosophyspinozasteven nadler
The Desecularization of Descartes
John Cottingham’s discussion of Descartes has resonance to the way Locke has been treated in the academy. I was astounded going back some 30 years that Locke could be so blithely discussed on a political philosophy course (UCL) with no mention of the vital role God has in his system of ideas — The Reasonableness of…
René Descartes
Born on this day. The following extract from Bernard Williams’ brilliant (but dense) Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. René Descartes was born on 31 March 1596 in a small town near Tours, now called la-Haye-Descartes, where the house of his birth can still be seen. His family belonged to the lesser nobility, his father and…
Bernard Williams’ Descartes and others on Williams
There was a minor philosopher in the 19th century who was described as the janitor of the Hegelian system, and there are many today who similarly become janitors of their own systems. There’s a lot of bad philosophy that’s hastily done, but there’s always been. No doubt the bad sort now will take on the…
Retrieving Realism
Speaking of Being in the World this (prima facie) is what one would call a philosophy publishing event. charles taylorCognitionCognitive neuroscienceCognitive scienceconsciousnessDavid HumeDescartesdistributed cognitiondistributed knowledgedonald davidsonEmbodied cognitionEpistemologyHubert DreyfusKantnatural kindsphilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindquinerealismRetrieving RealismRortysituated cognitionWittgenstein
Bernard Williams
I’ve just had the occasion to read a posthumously published paper by Bernard Williams. One is reminded what a top-notch mind he was, steering a balance between the worst excesses of analytical philosophy’s logicism and continental obscurity, yet with devastating and readable arguments. (OK, I concede that the one exception is his incredibly dense but…
Plato to Domino
It’s been exactly five years since this “blog” began. So I thought I’d mark the occasion with an unlikely pairing – Plato and “Fats” Domino, the latter arguably the earliest pioneer of what we have come to recognize as rock ‘n roll. Eldridge Cleaver or somebody said that, with rock, the blacks gave the middle…
Shaun Gallagher: Enactively extended intentionality
Shaun Gallagher talk: I argue that the extended mind hypothesis requires an enactive, neo-pragmatic concept of intentionality if it is to develop proper responses to a variety of objections. This enactive concept of intentionality is based on the phenomenological concept of a bodily (or motor or operative) intentionality outlined by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I explore…
manwithoutqualities 