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 […]

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 […]

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

In my attempt to learn a bit more from some “post”-analyitic philosophers, I’ve decided to begin by revisiting Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature ([amazonify]0691020167::text::::sold here[/amazonify]).  I rather regret going back to this text before having had direct experience with the work of Heidegger in particular, but I am also displeased that I […]

Beginning work on ethics, psychology, and situations

I’ve begun constructing a brief summary of Kwame Anthony Appiah‘s [amazonify]0674026098::text::::Experiments in Ethics[/amazonify] for next week’s philosophy club meeting.  I intend to focus on three main concepts, beginning with the assumption of virtue ethics, moving through the challenges of situationist ethics, and ultimately applying a hybrid of those two concerns to the situations provided by […]