The thesis of Ontological Relativity – that what exists is relative – is only intelligible if one first understands Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of translation, presented in great detail in his book, Word and Object (1960) and rehearsed briefly in the early...
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. —Paul, Letter to the Romans 7.15 (Revised Standard Version) There is a certain line of thinking that has been part of the Western narrative since antiquity, one...
“Two Dogmas” is widely thought to have dealt a fatal blow to Logical Empiricism, a 20th Century version of the classical Empiricism of the Enlightenment. At the heart of Logical Empiricism is the idea that all the well-formed statements of a language are either [a]...
When I was still teaching, the last unit of my introductory level Ethics and Contemporary Issues course was devoted to the question of moral concern for non-human animals. We would begin with excerpts from Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics, then move on to Cora...
Course Notes are short pieces on classic papers and essays that I taught regularly, during my thirty-year career as a philosophy professor. https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/pascal_wager.pdf Over the 20+ years that I taught philosophy at Missouri State...
Course Notes are short pieces on classic papers and essays that I taught regularly, during my thirty-year career as a philosophy professor. The central message of Sibley’s thesis is that aesthetic concepts are not ascribed by way of criteria, but require taste,...
Course Notes are short pieces on classic papers and essays that I taught regularly, during my thirty-year career as a philosophy professor. ___ http://employees.csbsju.edu/dbeach/beautytruth/Sontag-Against%20Interpretation.pdf The kind of interpretation that Sontag...
That the humanities and liberal arts in higher education are in trouble is well-established, with not a week passing in which some department or program isn’t eliminated or significant numbers of faculty given pink slips. My own subject, philosophy, is being hit...
If you were to pinch the nearest analytically trained philosopher and ask him for the worst, most obviously fallacious argument in his tradition, he might very well tell you that it is the so-called “proof” for the existence of the external world that G.E. Moore gives...
I’ve written a lot about the confusions that plague academic philosophers, and one of the things we are the most confused about is the sort of expertise our education and work confers. A doctor of veterinary medicine is an expert on animal physiology and health. A...
___ Philosophy professors like to think that ours is a clarifying business, so some of you may be surprised to discover that we can be confused about things that most ordinary people are not. One of these things is partiality and impartiality and how they affect...
With some notable exceptions, philosophers claim to eschew rhetoric; those uses of language whose aim is not to persuade by means of appeal to a person’s rational consciousness but by way of the sensibility and emotions. The arguments are what should count, we say,...
First of all, the “Free Will Problem” is a stupid name. I mean, do I have to think there is such a thing as a “will” in order to believe in free will? Or “freedom,” beyond that of being able to go to the mall if I want to or not if don’t? So, I’d rather talk about...
The “Law of the Instrument” is a common bias that involves excessive reliance on a familiar tool, even when it is ill-suited to the task at hand. As Abraham Maslow characterized it in 1966,“If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as...
Complaining is a treasured part of academic life. There’s the serious complaining, like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (sample quotation: “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university...
By now, most readers know that I am an atheist, as I do not believe in the existence of God or anything supernatural. Readers also likely know that I am Jewish by lineage and culturally and that I think God is useless both as an explanation and as a moral exemplar....
Surveys suggest that most professional philosophers think that the aim of philosophy is to arrive at true positions on subjects ranging from Morality to Knowledge, Reality, Mind, and the like. They think there are determinate answers as to whether moral realism or...
If something is permitted, it means that you are allowed to do it. If something is not permitted, it means that you are not. If swimming in the community pool is permitted only on the weekends, it means that if you show up on a weekend, you will be allowed into the...
Daniel Kaufman and Robert Talisse on Sustaining Democracy, 9/19/2021. https://youtu.be/jkmKb4MJUe4
That the personal is political is a bit of wisdom from the 1960’s, which suggests that we should not ignore domestic affairs in the political arena. That the personal is philosophical is an idea that goes back to Antiquity and to Socrates, who is reported by Plato to...
Brian Leiter recently invited people to suggest “philosophical things that everyone should know.” I answered with ten things, which you can see in the comments on the original post. What philosophical ideas should non-philosophers know about? But then I started...
[1] You are talking with a friend who is a bit too taken with superhero comics. Halfway into an enthusiastic speech regarding the virtues of Captain America, you say to him gently, “You do realize that Captain America doesn’t exist, right?” What effect is this...
My interest here is in the way that Standpoint Epistemology (SE hereafter) is deployed in contemporary moral and political discourse. I am not interested in hypothetical, abstract, idealized treatments of the subject. The effort to develop an idealized form of SE...
Thomas Szasz is an enigma. He is a trained psychiatrist who spent decades railing against psychiatry. He said that mental illness is a myth, compared involuntary psychiatric treatment to slavery, and made a case that all drugs – including psychiatric ones – should be...
You may ask: What does an old white man like me know about girls and women in philosophy? Well, I used to (and still do) teach them. The issue I want to discuss is the underrepresentation of women in getting a PhD or a tenure track position in philosophy. In arts and...
There’s always a little light-hearted ribbing around the office or among friends over March Madness betting pools. But basketball-related disputes are sometimes more enduring. Statisticians and researchers have been passionately divided for decades over the mere issue...
Philosophers sacralize moral obligation and maintain that moral considerations are always overriding of all others, but ordinary people [as well as philosophers in their ordinary lives] hold actions done from earnest desire in higher esteem than those done from duty....
[1] You are with a friend in a restaurant, and he tells you that you ought not (in the moral sense) order the linguine con vongole that you are considering. When you ask him why, he tells you that eating clams violates their interests. You reply that you don’t care...
https://youtu.be/MlPnezRPCt8 Transcript Stasis; change. Rest; motion. Solid; liquid. These are all contrasting metaphors where one side – stasis, rest, solid – refer to a constant, and the other – change, motion, liquid – refer to movement. Each needs the other. If...
John Xu and me with our vintage wood racquets For the last three years or so, my tennis partner (John Xu) and I have been playing with wood racquets: he with a vintage Jack Kramer; I with a vintage Chris Evert Autograph. Towards the end of 2022, John became aware that...
A few weeks ago, I cleaned out my office at Missouri State University, in Springfield, where I’ve been a professor since 1999. I retired this Fall, following my wife, Nancy, who in the Spring finished fifteen years of teaching high school. It’s been three years since...
The comedian Paul F. Tompkins once said that we live in a golden age of cowardice. What he meant was that the Internet allows for more people than ever before to anonymously throw brickbats at strangers. Along similar lines, I wonder if we’re about to enter an age of...
Like all parents of young children today, I’ve sat through more episodes of Paw Patrol (and similar children’s programming) than I’d like. But as a philosopher, it gives me an interesting insight into how we as a culture use stories as a way to gradually bring our...