Goetz and Taliaferro’s “Naturalism”: A Little Argument with Myself

recommended listening: Low’s “A Little Argument with Myself”, from the album Trust (hear it on Youtube or buy it at Insound) I recently took it upon myself to read Charles Taliaferro and Stewart Goetz‘s work Naturalism ([amazonify]0802807682::text::::for sale here[/amazonify]).  I highly recommend the book for anyone looking for a good summary of some considerations of […]

Happy William Blake Day (a week late or so)!

Alright, perhaps it is not yet an official holiday (is it?), but November 28th is in fact the anniversary of the death of this remarkable British poet-artist.  It has been far too long since I added a meaningful post here; I have been working on a number of new things which have simply not allowed […]

Hobbes and modern science v. Descartes (v. Rorty)

When I first read the opening from Hobbes’ Leviathan as an undergraduate, I laughed.  I laughed heartily.   There was something clearly, and quaintly, absurd about his simple (though perhaps vaguely Rube-Goldberg-esque) chain of mechanistic causal events which for him became the workings of the universe.  From Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 1: Of Sense: The cause […]

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Introduction

Having now crossed the introductory threshold into Rorty’s work, a few general notions have struck me.  The first is that it seems to me that Rorty, despite having a varied set of philosophical positions as a youth (assuming his autobiography is correct) and during his early philosophical career, held a remarkably stable philosophical position from […]