Sundry items of philosophy (in the loose & popular sense)

Lives of famous Scottish philosophers.

Carrie Figdor interviews Richard Fumerton about his book Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism. Fumerton mentions a course that he took as an undergrad at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, where he took philosophy courses with Francis Sparshott and Peter Hess. I attended Vic in the late 80's and took several courses with Hess, who completed his doctoral work at Brown under Roderick Chisholm (who supervised a lot of good philosophers).

From 2009: 'Moral and political philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, honoured at [University College Dublin]' (inc. a 50-minute talk by MacIntryre).

Michael Rosen reviews Onora O'Neill's Acting on Principle: an Essay on Kantian Ethics.

From the Nordic Wittgenstein Review, Hans-Johann Glock's paper 'Reasons for Action:Wittgensteinian and Davidsonian Perspectives in Historical and Meta-Philosophical Context'.

Here's a bio of mathematician Karl Menger, son of economist Carl Menger. 

Dale DeBakcsy on Ludwig Feuerbach.



From last July, Habermas interviewed about the 'Internet and Public Sphere: What the Web Can't Do'.

Edith Ackermann interviewed by Urs Hirschberg on 'Talent, intuition, creativity: on the limits of digital technologies'.
Ancient commentators on Aristotle.

Parts 1 and 2 of  Mohammed Hashas' reflections on Islamic philosophy.

Richard J. Bernstein on 'The Pragmatic Roots of Cultural Pluralism'.

Seyla Benhabib in the NY Times: 'Who’s On Trial, Eichmann or Arendt?'

From last July, Benhabib on 'Human Rights and the Critique of “Humanitarian Reason”':

This prevalent mood of disillusionment and cynicism among many concerning human rights and humanitarian politics is understandable; but it is not defensible. Developments in international law since 1948 have tried to give new legal meaning to "human dignity" and "human rights". Admittedly, these developments have in turn generated the paradoxes of "humanitarian reason"....

Eric Posner's Twilight of Human Rights Law will be released in October. 

Margaret Somers and Fred Block on 'The Return of Karl Polanyi'. Karl Polanyi had a home in Pickering, the suburb of Toronto in which I was raised. Karl taught in the USA, but his wife Ilona Duczynska (more here) wasn't allowed to live there due to her socialist past. Karl Polanyi's daughter Kari Levitt was an economics professor at McGill University. Karl's nephew John won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry and taught at the University of Toronto. John's father (and Karl's brother) Michael Polanyi was an accomplished philosopher who anticipated some of Thomas Kuhn's ideas. There needs to be an at least three-volume work of historical fiction about this family.

'David Flusfeder’s novel John the Pupil follows three students of the medieval philosopher-savant Roger Bacon who make a secretive journey from England to the seat of the papacy at Viterbo'.

Jonathan Israel and Lynn Hunt trade blows over her review of his book Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre:'Hunt roundly berates me for the significance I attribute to Diderot, d’Holbach, and Helvétius, making one mistake after another.'

Marcus du Sautoy on Borges' appeal to mathematicians. Includes a mention of Cantor and a clip of Borges being interviewed in 1971. Borges 'read all Bertrand Russell's books on logic and maths'. Rebecca DeWald reviews a couple of companions to Borges.

From a thought-provoking post by sociologist Thomas Sheff:

The discipline of psychology, for example, has become Brahean, committed to systematic studies, even if they don’t work. One example: more than twenty thousand studies using self-esteem scales. These studies are systematic, but they don’t predict behavior and are therefore useless.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister tackles one of the biggest pseudo-scientific frauds of our day, the unsupported rhetoric about the importance of self-esteem.

From last June, 'A Philosopher Refutes the "Stuck in Time" Hypothesis of Amnesia' (about a paper by Carl F. Craver).

Here's a short poem by Edgar Lee Masters -- 'Imanuel Ehrenhardt' -- that manages to fit mentions of philosophers Sir William Hamilton, Dugald Stewart, Locke, Descartes, Fichte, Schelling, Kant, and Schopenhauer into its first five lines. Masters sets aside these philosophers in favour of John Muir.

Philosophical Style

New Apps has a thread on 'great lines in philosophy.' Here's a page of such lines compiled at Siris in 2009. The New Apps thread was occasioned by Jim Holt's NY Times piece on literary style in philosophy. Brand Blanshard gave a talk on philosophical style in 1953. He mentions Mill and Locke as two good stylists. 

Blanshard himself wrote well at least sometimes (I haven't read that much of his work). The following passage by Blanshard is too lengthy to count as a great line, but I like the way he here contrasts the rational (or normative) and causal (or mechanical) orders. I also like his use of 'supervenes' in 1966 (though I'm not sure of that date) to capture something about the mind-body relation before that term caught on in philosophy of mind. Donald Davidson is often credited with introducing the term into the philosophy of mind in 1970. While Davidson spoke of mental events as supervening on physical ones, Blanshard writes here of one type of 'law' (or perhaps the 'operation' of one law) as supervening on another.

Thinking in art and morals and even mathematics is neither the reflection in consciousness of a mechanical order in the brain nor the tracing with the mind’s eye of some empirical order in its object, but an endeavour to realize in thought an ideal order which would satisfy an inner demand. The nearer thought comes to its goal, the more it finds itself under constraint by that goal, and dominated in its creative effort by aesthetic or moral or logical relevance. These relations of relevance are not physical or psychological relations. They are normative relations that can enter into the mental current because that current is . . . teleological. Their operation marks the presence of a different type of law, which supervenes upon physical and psychological laws when purpose takes control. (Brand Blanshard, 1966)

Actually, I don't know where Blanshard wrote this. I copied this passage from one of his works but noted only the year and not the title of the work in question, and now I can't locate on-line any publication by him in 1966. Hmm. (He also used 'supervene' to characterize relations between different causal orders in his 'Case for Determinism' [1961].)

Consciousness, Buddhism & human nature

Alan Saunders interviews David Chalmers about 'zombies and consciousness'

Does possibility entail conceivability? See the comments for points about Davidson's reliance on this entailment in his argument against the possibility of a language that isn't translatable into our own.

On Philosophy Bites, Frank Jackson is interviewed about 'what Mary knew'

William Seager reviews a posthumous collection of papers by idealist and panpsychist T. L. S. Sprigge (The Importance of Subjectivity: Selected Essays in Metaphysics and Ethics)

Mr. Waggish on Buddhism and Galen Strawson's panpsychism

Pain reduction through meditation? 'The degree of concordance between these studies suggests that meditative practices may indeed reduce pain through a unique neural mechanism, one corresponding to increased attention and reduced evaluative/emotional responses'

From last March, David Weisman on Buddhism's anticipation of key findings in modern neuroscience.

Tim Thornton's neat-looking course, 'Meaning, understanding and explanation'

Adrian Owen's detection of consciousness in people previously thought not to have it (people in vegetative states).

From the Abstract for a paper called 'What is a "mood-congruent" delusion? History and conceptual problems': 'This article investigates the history of the concept of mood-congruent delusions and the problems accompanying this concept. In the late nineteenth century, there were conflicting views regarding the relationship between the contents of an individual’s delusional thought and his/her affective state.'

Edge's 'Master Class' on the science of human nature (with Daniel Kahneman, Michael Gazzaniga, Steven Pinker, etc.).

Unfortunately, Kate's performance is cut off in this clip, so if you want the whole of her song, the original video is on YouTube.