Philosophy:
Zombies have invaded the philosophy blogosphere, and Brandon of Siris, in providing links to all the other stuff, made some pretty strong claims that I was hoping he'd expand upon. And fortunately he has, in a follow up post that's...
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Posted on April 14, 2008 11:21 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So there's a Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper in press on the cognitive differences between human and nonhuman animals that is related, in some ways, to my own work (it even cites me twice... yay, the citation count for...
Posted on November 4, 2007 11:46 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've been out of town since Saturday, with no internet access. Thank goodness for tiny islands on the gulf coast of Florida. Unfortunately, I'm still sick, and I'm exhausted, so I'm going to have to hold off on posts that...
Posted on July 18, 2007 11:06 PM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
First, an obituary by his friend, Jürgen Habermas. It begins with a story of Rorty making light of the illness that ultimately killed him: After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have...
Posted on June 16, 2007 10:53 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I just learned that Richard Rorty died Friday. I was a big fan of his work as an undergrad, and at that time both Consequences of Pragmatism and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity had a big influence on my thinking....
Posted on June 9, 2007 11:59 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Some of you who are interested in the history of psychology or philosophy of mind might find this paper interesting: Gentner, D., & Grudin, J. (1985). The evolution of mental metaphors in psychology: A 90-year retrospective. American Psychologist, 40(2), 181-192....
Posted on May 17, 2007 9:05 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The second Online Philosophy Conference has begun, and the first week's presentations are up. If you didn't participate in last year's OPC, here's how it works: a presentation and one or two responses are posted for you to read, and...
Posted on May 14, 2007 4:05 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As Trinifar says, we're witnessing a great atheist schism. While there are actually several different types of atheists participating (I wonder if we're just playing into the hands of anti-atheist rhetoric by pretending we are, or should be, a homogenous...
Posted on April 24, 2007 1:05 PM • 53 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Some of you may find this book chapter interesting: Hauer, M.D., Young, L., & Cushman, F. (in press): Reviving Rawls' Linguistic Analogy: Operative principles and the causal structure of moral actions. In Moral Psychology and Biology....
Posted on March 27, 2007 12:18 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here's an article from Physics Web (via 3 Quarks Daily) that seems appropriate, in the context of the last two posts. Here's the conclusion of the article: But the image of the book of nature can haunt us today. One...
Posted on January 5, 2007 10:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Comments on the last post make it clear that my use of the label "scientism" is far from clear. It does not mean a rejection of science, or its methods (though I do have to roll my eyes when someone...
Posted on January 5, 2007 9:06 PM • 187 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
When science replaces religion, it becomes more and more like religion, and in the minds of its worshipers, can justify the same sorts of inhumanities. Witness Richard Dawkins, todays leading worshiper of science, calling for deposed dictators to be used...
Posted on January 4, 2007 11:29 PM • 83 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In lieu of an effortful post on cognitive science while I'm relaxing for the holidays, I thought I'd say a few things about religion and Dawkins again. If you hang around ScienceBlogs, you've probably noticed the spat between the two...
Posted on December 31, 2006 9:48 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
OK, the last two posts with quotes from philosophers were at least remotely relevant to recent discussions on this blog. These quotes will be completely irrelevant, but they've stuck with me since I first read them at least a decade...
Posted on December 16, 2006 6:14 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here are two pretty lengthy passages from two Ortega y Gasset essays, both published in History as a System (one of my favorite books), and translated by Helene Weyl. I'm posting them because I think they're relevant to our recent...
Posted on December 13, 2006 7:53 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Since it's come up a lot, here's a recent discussion of Anselm's Ontological Argument in the philosophical literature (via OPP). Millican, P. (2004). The one fatal flaw in Anselm's Aagument. Mind, 113, 437-476. Anselm's Ontological Argument fails, but not for...
Posted on December 7, 2006 6:57 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I posted these long ago on the old blog, but I was reading Studies in Pessimism, and when I came across them, I decided to post them again. The parables are all from the last chapter of the book. At...
Posted on December 5, 2006 9:36 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In a comment at the end of the Religion and Science post, Brandon of Siris mentions Peter King as a source for discussions of Anselm's ontological argument. If you're interested, here's a link to his encyclopedia entry on Anselm, and...
Posted on November 29, 2006 3:22 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One more short post before we return to your regularly scheduled long-winded cog sci stuff. Greece vs. Germany on the soccer field. Enjoy....
Posted on November 27, 2006 9:41 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post on the unification of psychology, in which I addressed (rather critically) a paper by Gregg Henriques. Dr. Henriques was kind of enough to reply in comments, and because it's a two-week old...
Posted on November 19, 2006 10:22 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What is psychology? If you were asked to define it, could you? In the 12 years that I've been studying psychology, I've been asked no more than 5 times what psychology is, and each time, I struggled and ultimately failed...
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Posted on November 2, 2006 8:04 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I had a birthday recently, and my parents went shopping in an antique and rare book store, and got me the two volumes of Brand Blanshard's The Nature of Thought. I immediately read through the first book on perception, and...
Posted on November 1, 2006 1:08 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's a really interesting post by Alberto over at Alpha Psy titled "Methodological Materialism" that I thought I'd point you to, in case you hadn't read it already. Here's an excerpt: As I see things, there is no deeper epistemological...
Posted on October 28, 2006 12:40 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at the Experimental Philosophy blog, Joshua Knobe has a post about a series of experiments that he has run with Jesse Prinz on people's intuitions about consciousness, and he includes a link to a draft of the paper they're...
Posted on October 4, 2006 5:58 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
No, seriously. The paper in which Carrie Jenkins presents a conceptual analysis of flirting is here (via Online Papers in Philosophy). An except: What is it to flirt? Do you have to intend to flirt with someone in order to...
Posted on September 13, 2006 6:03 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From what I know of Graham Priest, he's an interesting philosopher. I read his book on intentionality, Towards Non-Being a few months ago, and enjoyed it, and I read his Introduction to Non-Classical Logic a few years ago, and have...
Posted on July 21, 2006 10:52 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post that was pretty critical of the current state of Experimental Philosophy. In the post, I focused on the work of Joshua Knobe, not because his work is the worst Experimental Philosophy has...
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Posted on June 16, 2006 10:27 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Cognitive stuff from a cognitive person. If you've got any requests, drop me an email. If it takes me a while to get to it, drop me another one.
