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 […]

Ethics, situations, and the like

I’ve finished preparing my “summary” of Kwame Anthony Appiah‘s [amazonify]0674026098::text::::Experiments in Ethics[/amazonify].  I ended up deviating a bit too much to call my work a real summary, but I think many of the points will make for useful discussion.  A lot of material has been intentionally left out, particularly after the situational examples illustrated, because […]

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 […]