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)…
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…
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…
[Note: There are some formatting issues that still need to be attended to] Polybius believes that the historian’s task is to identify the causes of past events, making these events intelligible and therefore functional to an educative (practical and moral) purpose. This conception of historical activity has to a great degree informed historical thinking ever…
An appreciation of David Wiggins’ Sameness and Substance (there is some notation later in this piece that needs to be rectified – some characters were lost in the copy and paste) —————————————————- The social constructionist argument takes the generic form of: 1. x need not have existed, or need be at all as it is.…
manwithoutqualities 