Category: Metaphilosophy
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Philosophy, Pride, and Humility
Philosophy can fuel intellectual pride. And it manifestly does in far too many of its practitioners. But pursued far enough and deep enough it may lead to insight into the infirmity of reason, an insight one salutary benefit of which is intellectual humility. Our patron saint was known for his knowing nescience, his learned ignorance. …
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Philosophers Who Compartmentalize and Those Who Don’t
For many philosophers, their technical philosophical work bears little or no relation to the implicit or explicit set of action-guiding beliefs and values that constitutes their worldview. Saul Kripke, for example, is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath and rejects naturalism and materialism. But you would never know it from his technical work which…
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Kripke’s Misrepresentation of Meinong
In "Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities" (in Philosophical Troubles, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 52-74) Saul Kripke distances himself from the following view that he ascribes to Alexius Meinong: Many people have gotten confused about these matters because they have said, 'Surely there are fictional characters who fictionally do such-and-such things; but fictional characters don't exist;…
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God Doesn’t Philosophize
He doesn't need to. We need to. But our neediness goes together with our inability to make any progress at it. A double defect: need and inability. The truth we need we cannot acquire by our own efforts. It is this fact that motivates some philosophers to consider the possibility of divine revelation. They can…
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A Paraphrastic Approach to Fictional Sentences
Here is a dyad for your delectation: 1. There are no purely fictional characters. 2. There are some purely fictional characters, e.g., Sherlock Holmes. (1) looks to be an analytic truth: by definition, what is purely fictional is not, i.e., does not exist. But (2) also seems to be true. And yet they cannot both…
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Divine Simplicity, the Formal Distinction, and the Real Distinction
If I understand Duns Scotus on the divine simplicity, his view in one sentence is that the divine attributes are really identical in God but formally distinct. (Cf. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God, Ashgate 2005, p. 111) I can understand this if I can understand the formal distinction (distinctio formalis) and how it differs…
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Peter Unger on Bertrand Russell on the Value of Philosophy
This from a reader: In one portion of Grace Boey's interview of Peter Unger, Unger discusses what Russell had to say about the value of philosophy, and I was a bit taken aback because that particular quotation by Russell resonates with me a lot, and Unger's swift dismissal of it as garbage left me almost…
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Can One Copulate One’s Way to Chastity? Notes on Wittgenstein and Unger
Grace Boey interviews Peter Unger about his new book Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy. Excerpt: In a way, all I’m doing is detailing things that were already said aphoristically by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. I read it twice over in the sixties, pretty soon after it came out, when I was an undergraduate.…
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Philosophy as Hobby, as Career, as Vocation
An e-mail from a few years back with no name attached: [Brian] Leiter fancies himself a gatekeeper to the realm of academic philosophy. You gotta love the professional gossip that seeps through his blog – Ned Block got an offer from Harvard but turned it down, here's the latest coming out of the Eastern APA,…
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Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead
First posted 8 February 2011. Time for a re-run. Etienne Gilson famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers." That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat. It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its…
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How Much Time for Philosophy? Part II
Dear Bill, Thanks for that post! Here are my two simple comments: How much time should one spend on philosophy? "A good chunk of the day," you say; assuming that one is above all else interested in truth (about ultimate issues) and/or in the Absolute. But should one be interested in either of these? That's…
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Are Problems in Applied Ethics Insoluble?
Long-time Pakistani reader A. A. presents me with a nice challenging question: You hold the view that the central problems of philosophy are insoluble. I assume that also includes central questions of ethics and meta-ethics, such as the existence of objective moral values. What implication does this have, however, for the more peripheral and applied…
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How Much Time Should be Spent on Philosophy?
Our Czech friend Vlastimil Vohanka writes, You blogged that doing philosophy has great value in itself; even if philosophy is aporetic. But how often, or how long per day or month, should one devote to it? Doing philosophy seems (to me at least) to have diminishing returns, if philosophy is aporetic. Or has your experience been different?…
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On the Use and Abuse of Occam’s Razor
I am not historian enough to pronounce upon the relation of what is standardly called Occam's Razor to the writings of the 14th century William of Ockham. The different spellings of his name will serve as a reminder to be careful about reading contemporary concerns into the works of philosophers long dead. Setting aside historical concerns,…
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Solubility Skepticism, Religion, and Reason
Ruffin Crozat writes, There is much depth in your short post on religion and reason from 6 May. Here are two points I often ponder about this topic: First, I appreciate the difficulty of solving philosophical problems, but I wonder about the claim that they are insoluble (I suppose “insoluble” means “insoluble by humans alone”).…