Category: Metaphilosophy
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Life’s Optics Versus Thought’s Synoptics
One cannot live without being onesided, without choosing, preferring, favoring oneself and one's own, without staking out and defending one's bit of ground. One cannot live without being onesided, but one cannot be much of a philosopher if one is. The philosopher's optics are a synoptics, but life's optics are perspectival. And so philosophy is enlivened at…
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We Romantics
We are enticed by what is hidden, out of reach, around the corner, over the horizon. It is the lost mine lost, not the lost mine found, that inspires and focuses our energies. Our metaphysics is visionary and revisionary, not descriptive. We study the world to see what is beyond the world. We study the…
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Pushing Outwards Toward the Limits of Mystery
Flannery O'Connor, "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction" in Mystery and Manners (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 40-42: All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality. Since the eighteenth century, the popular spirit of each succeeding…
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A Prime Example of Philosophical Cockiness
Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected." (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction. Variations on Meinong's Theory of…
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In Praise of Blogosophy
Philosophy is primarily an activity, not a body of doctrine. If you were to think of it as a body of doctrine, then you would have to say there is no philosophy, but only philosophies. For there is no one universally recognized body of doctrine called philosophy. The truth of course is one not many.…
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‘Leibniz’s Law’: A Useless Expression
Pedant and quibbler that I am, it annoys me when I hear professional philosophers use the phrase 'Leibniz's Law.' My reason is that it is used by said philosophers in three mutually incompatible ways. That makes it a junk phrase, a wastebasket expression, one to be avoided. Some use it as Dale Tuggy does, here, to refer…
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‘We are All Dying’
In an interview a while back Christopher Hitchens said, "We are all dying." The saying is not uncommon. A friend over Sunday breakfast invoked it. The irony of it is that the friend in question in younger days was decisively influenced by the Ordinary Language philosophers. Taken literally, the sentence is false: only some of…
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Were the Greatest Philosophers Theists or Atheists?
To answer the title question, we must first answer the logically prior question as to who the greatest philosophers were. But this presupposes an answer to the equally vexing question of who counts as a philosopher. Heidegger published two fat volumes on Nietzsche, but dismissed Kierkegaard as a mere "religious writer." Others will go him…
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The Enmity Potential of Thought and Philosophy as Blood Sport
Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951, hrsg. v. Medem (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1991), S. 213 (14. I. 49): Das Feindschaftpotential des Denkens ist unendlich. Denn man kann nicht anders als in Gegensätzen denken. Le combat spirituel est plus brutal que la bataille des hommes. The enmity potential of thought is infinite.…
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The Court of Philosophy
Philoponus makes a fascinating suggestion: You know, your inquiry into burden-of-proof (BOP) has put the idea in my mind that we could, if we wanted, institute something like a “court of philosophy”. Bear with me for paragraph—I don’t mean what follows as parody. It would work like a civil action in which a claimant appears…
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Two Putative Counterexamples to My Burden-of-Proof Thesis
A reader presents two putative counterexamples to my claim that burden-of-proof considerations have no useful role to play in philosophy: I agree that BOP’s in the legal sense don’t exist in philosophical argument, but there seems to be something like a BOP in certain kinds of philosophical debate. I’ll give you two examples and let…
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Miracles and Burden of Proof
0. I continue my investigation of the role of burden-of-proof considerations in philosophy. My ruminations are collected in the aptly titled category, Burden of Proof. 1. Consider a dispute in which one party claims that there are miracles and the other claims that there are no miracles. Where does the burden of proof (BOP) lie? …
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Defeasible Presumption and Evidence: A Confusion in McInerny
A defeasible presumption in favor of proposition p is not evidence for p. In a legal proceeding there is a defeasible presumption of innocence (POI): one is presumed innocent until proven guilty. For example, Jones, who has been charged with Smith's murder, is presumed to be not guilty until such time as the presumption is defeated. …
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Burden of Proof: Something to Avoid?
Joshua Orsak e-mails: I've been following closely your recent discussions on the burden of proof in philosophy, as its been a particular interest of mine ever since I first read Alvin Plantinga. I've been linking to your posts on the matter on my facebook page. Your recent post reminded me vaguely of something my friend…
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Burden of Proof in Philosophy?
1. The question this post raises is whether it is at all useful to speak of burden of proof (BOP) in dialectical situations in which there is no judge or tribunal to lay down and enforce rules of procedure. By a dialectical situation I mean a context in which orderly discussion occurs among two or more competent…