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 […]