All of philosophy, Whitehead famously quipped, is a footnote to Plato. Not only does Plato’s corpus cover almost everything that we have come to call “philosophy,” but many great (and minor) thinkers have spent careers writing commentary on Socrates’s famous student—footnotes to Plato. Beginning with the Hellenistic schools devoted to Plato and Aristotle, there were the Continue Reading …
Nozick on Metaphysics, Yoga, and, Um, Self-Gratification
Big, meaty questions, those we tend to associate with metaphysics, inhabit the intellectual ecosystem like slaughtered prey on the plains. Once the lions of science take them down, carrion seekers—religion vultures, philosophy maggots—take over to see that the bones are picked clean, and whenever we gnaw at them, we could be said to be doing philosophy, at least in some way. Continue Reading …
How Not to Make a Movie in the Multiverse
There are many great, mind-bending science fiction films that, for whatever reason, are worth watching over and over, if only to suss out what actually happened. Coherence, the most ironically titled movie to come along in a while, is not one of them. Fans of science fiction, and science fiction films especially, could probably name dozens. The first that come to my mind Continue Reading …
Foucault’s Precursor: Kuhn?
Dig into the PEL archives and you will find a link to a paper by Hubert Dreyfus on Foucault and Heidegger in which he writes that in Foucault’s early work “the subject is reduced to a function of discourse.†Dreyfus is illustrating an important link between these two towering figures - the role of language, which Heidegger called “the house of being.â€Â Continue Reading …
What Can Regular Words Do?
[From David Crohn, Friend of the Podcast] Question: How are Ludwig Wittgenstein, this sentence, and shooting your neighbor’s donkey related? I had no idea—until I listened to In Our Time's excellent (not PEL-excellent, but pretty close) introduction to Ordinary Language Philosophy. OLP was the effort on behalf of a group of post-Wittgenstein philosophers to clarify the Continue Reading …
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant
[Editor's Note: Thanks to new blogger David Crohn for this glimpse into one aspect of Nietzsche's relationship with his idol.] In ep. 84 PEL touches briefly on Nietzsche's criticism of Schopenhauer—or rather, the ways Schopenhauer's readers have, according to Nietzsche, accepted the weakest aspects of his philosophy first (aphorism 99). Nietzsche was a great admirer of Continue Reading …