I want to give a plug to the soon to be released book by my chum David Livingstone Smith. DLS has that wonderful ability to make serious reading very accessible while never dumbing down the subject matter. Here is a just released UNE article on DLS. See here for the book’s Amazon page listing endorsements from some of the biggest names in the field.
Article in the NYT via David Livingstone Smith. Nice photo by Steve Pyke as one would expect.
Foot’s legacy: I think she did make a relevant claim, when it needed to be discussed (i.e. when Hare’s prescriptivism, for good or ill, seemed to impose no restriction of content on moral judgement), that morality is internally related to considerations of benefit and harm and that not just anything can count as such. Her weakness was, I think, that she delivered aperçus but didn’t elaborate them – we just got articles and (then only latterly) very slender books. The books were passés, really. Ethics had moved on from the debates of the 50s from which she never genuinely emerged.
Some books to look out for in 2011:
Also Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (shame about the cringe-making subtitle that has all the hyperbolic clichés “toward,” “new” and that old favourite “paradigm.”)
Neuromania: On the limits of brain science
Not a deep surprise but still nice to see some empirical work coming through. Check out this brief report just published online in Nature Neuroscience. The upshot: participants with larger amygdalas typically had more people in their social lives and maintained more complex relationships.
The old firm of Taylor and Perry interview Dan Little for Philosophy Talk
Is history just a series of events, or an interpretation of those events? Is there progress in history? Can history be objective, or is it, as Napoleon said, just the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon? Ken and John revisit the past and it’s meaning with Daniel Little, Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn and author of New Contributions to the Philosophy of History. (First broadcast 1/11/2009)
Yet another installment on mind in the NYT – this time from the highly distinguished and very influential Tyler Burge.
Speaking of Andy Clark and Alva Noë in the previous posting, here is Noë writing for NPR set to continue in another installment.
After some very middling opinion articles in this forum we have Andy Clark who is both a superb stylist and actually has interesting things to say. The title of the piece echos Alva Noë’s recent Out of Our Heads. Andy references some great images recently featured in the NYT that I was tempted to say something about – but forgot.
John Searle’s philosophy of mind lectures freely available on iTunes.
Check out Peter Ludlow’s take on WikiLeak’s Julian Assange via Leiter.
Assange’s view seems to borrow from recent work on network theory, emergent systems, and work on self-synchronizing systems.
