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David Malet Armstrong

My chum Andrew Irvine has a terrific piece “David Armstrong and Australian Materialism” along with a Reader’s Guide in the latest issue of Quadrant. Andrew mentions that Armstrong attended Oakeshott’s History of Political Thought lectures earlier on his career when he had a stint at Birkbeck. I’d forgotten this unlikely connection: Armstrong had mentioned this to…

Paul Bloom on The War on Reason

Paul Bloom in The Atlantic For the most part, I’m on the side of the neuroscientists and social psychologists—no surprise, given that I’m a psychologist myself. Work in fields such as computational cognitive science, behavioral genetics, and social neuroscience has yielded great insights about human nature. I do worry, though, that many of my colleagues…

Picking Holes in the Concept of Natural Selection

Evan Thompson reviews two of the most controversial books of recent years: What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel. Cognitive neuroscienceCognitive scienceconsciousnessEvan Thompsonevolutionary biologyExplanationJerry FodorPhilosophy of mindsciencethomas nagel

Extending the Mind

A brief discussion from an anthropological perspective on Robert Logan’s book from a few years back. anthropologycomplexityevolutionary anthropologyExtended MindlanguagePhilosophy of LanguagePhilosophy of mindRobert K. Logan

There’s Something About Mary

Frank Jackson on the Mary thought experiment and “Epiphenomenal Qualia” Elsewhere I’ve written: Jackson’s thought experiment bears a striking resemblance to Hayek’s discussion in The Sensory Order, 1.95. Hayek took inspiration from C. D. Broad, the idea that an omnipotent being would still not be able to predict the qualia associated with a substance, for…

David Chalmers and Andy Clark Interview

This from the New Philosopher. Andy’s colleagues at Edinburgh in the epistemology department proposed the extended knowledge project, where you start thinking of knowledge as this extended process that involves interaction with the environment. I’ve been calling it stigmergic epistemology. active externalismAndy ClarkCognitionCognitive sciencecomplexityconsciousnessDavid ChalmersEmbodied cognitionExtended MindExternalismphilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindsocial epistemologyStigmergy

Why Study Philosophy?

This from The Atlantic. Philosophyphilosophy of economicsPhilosophy of EducationPhilosophy of historyPhilosophy of LanguagePhilosophy of mindphilosophy of religionPhilosophy of sciencephilosophy of social science