“American Philosopher”, part 2

Short film #2 in Phillip McReynolds‘s American Philosopher series offers a few pieces of information that divide up into histories of the early lives of contemporary American philosophers and the early life of philosophy in historic America. The former, tales about the temptations of philosophy in the early lives of modern thinkers, makes up the […]

“American Philosopher”, part 1

  There are a couple of nice little nuggets I’d like to pull out of this second video of American Philosopher.  First, I was excited to see the late John E. Smith join the video as an interviewee, though he seemed not to be mentioned in the teaser.  Smith was a great distiller of good […]

“American Philosopher”, part 0

There’s a new film (or series of eight rather short films, I guess) by Phillip McReynolds called American Philosopher.  You can watch the whole thing online, and it’s a pleasure that I recommend taking.  Quite frankly, it seems mostly to be a bunch of spliced-together interviews with a few major living (or recently living) academic […]

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

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 […]