Forthcoming: Walker Percy, Philosopher. Percy’s Poetics of Dwelling: The Dialogical Self and the Ethics of Reentry in The Last Gentleman and Lost in the Cosmos Christopher Yates Christopher Yates explores how two of Walker Percy’s seminal texts call us to practice self-examination in a way that seeks to overcome deceptive clarities in our lives. It is…
This very unusual piece on the state of German philosophy in the thoughtful Foreign Policy, still one of the better mags given how noticeably downhill The Economist and The Atlantic have gone. On the whole there is nothing wrong with popular philosophy so long as it is not peddling yet more reheated neo-Marxist Frankfurt School postmodern shite…
Review of the first installment of Hubert Dreyfus’ collected papers. Artificial intelligenceCognitionCognitive sciencedistributed cognitionEmbodied cognitionexistentialismExtended MindExternalismheideggerHermeneuticsHubert DreyfusJohn SearleMaurice Merleau-Pontyphenomenologyphilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindsituated cognition
Here’s a very good article by Rob Chodat It is the scientist’s “being-in-the-world” that allows her to describe planets and bacteria, “things and subhuman organisms,” but the “being-in-the-world” of the layman occupies what Percy calls a “different sort of reality,” resting upon the linguistic and social ties that constitute a “non-material, non-measurable entity.” And what holds…
Here’s a film that I chanced upon (I haven’t seen it yet). Once upon a time there was a world full of meaning, focused by exemplary figures in the form of gods and heroes, saints and sinners. How did we lose them, or, might they still be around, in the form of modern day masters,…
Namit Arora in a themed issue of Philosophy Now considers the complexity of consciousness and its implications for artificial intelligence. But despite the big advances in computing, AI has fallen woefully short of its ambition and hype. Instead, we have ‘expert’ systems that process predetermined inputs in specific domains, perform pattern matching and database lookups, and…
manwithoutqualities 