Several of you might have heard of this excellent philosophical time waster before, but it’s new to me (apparently it was first devised by Wilfrid Sellars):Identify three foods A, B, and C such that any two of these are complementary (taste good in combination) but […] Read More
REPOSTING After Keith DeRose’s recent post on the apparent end of The Philosopher’s Annual, Brian Weatherson suggested that some blogs, such as PEA Soup, might help take over their task (see this Certain Doubts post for more discussion). For various reasons, we’re not quite prepared […] Read More
I think Heath’s previous excellent post on the problems of expressivism brings up another problem – a version of the Frege-Geach problem, or a new aspect of it, that I hadn’t thought about. I’m sure someone has already spotted this and that there is an […] Read More
As regular readers of this blog will no doubt have noticed, I have a continuing fascination with expressivism. It both attracts and repels me, much like a David Lynch movie. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that I don’t like. Consider, […] Read More
Something has always bothered me about Parfit’s treatment of Scanlon’s contractualism both in his "Justifiability to Each Other" and in the new Climbing the Mountain. Finally after years of being troubled by this I think I’m starting to be able to put my finger on […] Read More
I’m a huge fan of sixties and seventies soul. I also love many of these songs for their lyrics. Some of them offer philosophical insights in a style that few philosophers are able to even come close. Here’s a great example from Stevie Wonder.
How much does it cost a department to interview job candidates at the Eastern APA? And is the information about the job candidates that one acquires worth that money?
In “Contractualism and Utilitarianism” Scanlon introduces what he calls “philosophical utilitarianism” (PU). PU is the view that “the only fundamental moral facts are facts about individual well-being.” PU is supposed to be answering a different question from the one answered by more familiar versions of utilitarianism. It is […] Read More
Winter is a good time for a bit of navel-gazing. Blogging is an interesting medium of philosophical discourse; its virtues and vices, it seems to me at any rate, are considerably different from those of the more standard, tenure-relevant sorts of philosophical work. Posts and […] Read More