Every minute I spend teaching Russell's analysis of descriptions is a minute I'm not strategizing about how to leverage AI-powered solutions to flip classrooms and empower students to enter the modern workforce with the agile skills our local business partners and their stakeholders value.
Born to be dean, cursed to be rank-and-file faculty.
These, of course, are intuitions; I do not have an argument for these conclusions. Nevertheless, the burden of proof is surely on the other side
The characteristic argumentative rigor of analytic philosophy.
Never once have I read G.E. Moore's list of facts he knows with certainty and wondered how to interpret the common sense view of the world.
It's sort of wild to me that Continental Philosophy has never produced anything as perspicuous as Bertrand Russell's famously clear Gray's Elegy argument in "On Denoting."
Given the peer review crisis, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes another 2,000 years for this to get published.
Retvrn to when naturalism meant telling plausible-sounding stories about how people might learn language by having their surfaces irritated.
I'm not sure I totally understand Leibniz's plan for crossing a river in view of an enemy army aside from the recommendation to make a cannon-proof boat.
www.leibniz-translations.com/river
If I knew what I know now in graduate school I wouldn't have audited Kant's first Critique like three times and would've replaced at least one of those with a class about making Canvas modules because my job has way less first Critique and way more making Canvas modules than I could've ever guessed.
Long time favorite.
theonion.com/im-like-a-ch...
Shortsighted. Eliminate Classics and future creators won't learn about Socrates, one of the West's first influencers--even if he quite famously didn't create content himself--and also someone who, through the invention of the Socratic method, has a lot to say about prompt engineering.
March Madness and Looping Effects: How Bracketology Made the Modern NCAA Fan
unintelligible (as in many anthropological and theological examples where the criteria of identity, for example, o f men with birds, three persons in one, etc., do not answer to our criteria), but where we may eventually become convinced that these locutions are part of a language because we are able to extend our understanding and our language in unpredict- able ways to give intelligibility. In such cases we have no evidence that there are rules for such extensions of under- standing— they certainly do not always conform in obvious ways to the application of propositional logic. For example, some alien locutions come to be understood eventually as metaphors, comparable with our non-propositional use of l a n g u a g e in poetic contexts. It is therefore never safe to claim that we have found necessary truths to demarcate language as such. To do so is to define the limits of language a priori in ways that can turn out arbitrary and unilluminating.
Mary Hesse came up with the plot to TNG's Darmok a full decade before it aired.
To this argument it may be, and has been, objected that the "vulgar" usage of the pair 'up-down' was never supposed to be so general as to be applicable to the universe as a whole. This may be the case (although I do not see any reason for assuming that "ordinary" people are so very cautious as to apply the pair to the surface of the earth only; all the passages referred to in the above quotations contradict this assumption and so does the fact that at all times real ordinary people-and not only their Oxford substitutes-were very much interested in celestial phe- nomena 104 ) . However, even such a restriction would not invalidate our argument. It would rather show that the pair was used for singling out an absolute direction near the surface of the earth and that it did not assume such a direction to exist throughout the universe. It is clear that even this modest position is incompatible with the ideas implicit in the Newtonian point of view, which does not allow for local anisotropies either.
"The reason why Oxford philosophers so rarely discuss the influence of astronomy upon everyday languages may perhaps be found in the weather of their favorite discussion place. However, this unfortunately does not explain their ignorance in physics, theology, mythology, biology, and even linguistics."
See also Feyerabend (1962, 86) on the Oxonians: "The reason why Oxford philosophers so rarely discuss the influence of astronomy upon everyday languages may perhaps be found in the weather of their favorite discussion place. However, this...does not explain their ignorance in [everything else]."
"It comes, first, from the desire to see "the whole correspond to its parts with wonderful simplicity" (341), as already expressed by Copernicus himself. ® It comes from the "typically metaphysical urge" for unity of understanding and of conceptual presentation. ∞ And, secondly, the motive for a change is connected with the intention to make room for the motion of the earth which Galileo has accepted and is not prepared to give up."
Cf. with this the still existing and even increasing resistance against universal understanding as it can be found in Professor Austin's "philosophy" (Sense and Sensibilia, remarks on Thales). What has advanced and even created science is today ridiculed and pushed aside by men (and women) who have barely advanced beyond the multiplication table."
Feyerabend on Austin's "philosophy" (scare quotes his), with a quip seemingly about the extent of Austin's scientific knowledge ("barely advanced beyond the multiplication table"), in the context of a discussion of Galileo, conceptual change, and experience.
archive.org/details/natu...
"Quanta and Reality" with some 1961 BBC lectures introduced by Stephen Toulmin, and featuring Mary Hesse on models and N.R. Hanson commenting.
archive.org/details/quan...
I found this chart aspirational; I too hope to live to 120 even if it means my influence wanes a bit.
A can of Yinz Jawn Pennsylvania lager. Yellow and red styled to look like a can of Pennsylvania Dutch birch beer.
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I guess some Pacific Northwest breweries are brewing Lager now.
"Neglected Alternative" sounds more like the title of an album compilation of lesser-known early 90s PNW bands rather than the metaphysical thesis that space and time are both forms of intuition and properties of things-in-themselves.
You talked about a war going on in Cambridge between historians and philosophers of science, but the sixties at Harvard seems that was also a place of confrontations… Did you feel that way when you were studying there in those years? Not at Harvard, in part because in a sense the war had already concluded. I took courses from Hillary Putnam and Israel Scheffler. The philosophers did not speak with the historians of scien- ce, and the historians of science did not speak with the philosophers. At Cambridge they were still together in one Department, and the colloquium was a battlefield. Particularly among the historians of Medicine, Robert Young and Karl Figlio, a Marxist approach was dominant, which was anathema to the philosophers. That was the early seventies, when the battle lines were poli- tical, and to some extent I think also national. Both Karl Figlio and Bob Young, that made their careers in Cambridge, were Americans. Among the philosophers, Mary Hesse was British and Gerd Buchdahl was German. It was in part a clash of different national, intellectual traditions and formations. I certainly never regretted the work that I did with Mary Hesse nor what I learned about Kant and Goethe’s Naturphilosophie from Gerd Buchdahl,. Howeverr, it was quite clear that a reconciliation among the warring parties was not in the offing, and for the graduate students who were there at the time it was like being in the midst of divorcing parents: you had to declare which side you were on. It was at that point that I decided that I was not going to continue my PhD at Cambridge
Lorraine Daston on historians and philosophers of science at Harvard and Cambridge (the university) in the 1970s.
ojs.fhce.edu.uy/index.php/co...
Socrates's h-index was 0.
Find the person in your department who is the commissioner of a yearly fantasy league and you will have someone who is ready for an internal leadership role. And if they are commissioner of a dynasty league, they are ready to be your university's next president.
A classic of world philosophy, the Zhuangzi revolutionized ethics and ontology forever with its Dao.
Now, in our latest issue, Rose Novick brings this masterpiece to a new generation of English readers with her magisterial translation & commentary.
strangematters.coop/rose-novick-...
I can't even recognize that time slice of me who thought he might have publishable professional opinions about Kant any more.
Kant by Paul Guyer and Kant and the claims of knowledge also by Paul Guyer open on my desk with a blue bandana next to it, which I suppose would be my old Kantian colors.
Bugs Bunny with a gun with a caption: "Lord forgive me but its time to go back to tha old me."
It's that part of the term in Modern Philosophy.
We're excited to announce the Spring 2026 PSA office hours! Come learn, ask questions, and connect with leading voices in philosophy of science!
Details in the 🧵
Registration at this link: www.philsci.org/psa_...
Is Mina Kimes the first Kantian to win an Emmy?
The book cover is out! This project consumed much of my brain for several years, and I learned a ton working on it.
As a pedestrian, there's nothing more delightful than crossing a street diagonally at an all-way walk.
A diagram. A tree to the right affects the senses of a person to the left giving rise to a thought bubble with two trees in it. Underneath a dashed line is a head using reason to come up with concepts that match the world.
Space and underneath are lots of s1s and then a square inside a circle inside a larger circle.
Latest achievements in whiteboard work.