[editors note: Daniel was our guest on the Deleuze episode recently and will be posting a bit in our blog over the next couple of weeks] Since I discovered Deleuze in grad school, he has pervaded in various ways my teaching, writing and thinking. My dissertation proffered a model of rhetoric and specifically the trope; its final chapter focused on Deleuze. And so when I Continue Reading …
More on Terrorism from Jonathan R. White (Huffington Post)
Jon was the guest on our terrorism episode, which has unfortunately become timely again. In light of the events in Boston he was asked to write about the nature of modern terrorism in the Huffington post; read the article here. As he did in our episode, he stresses in the article the need to rationally understand the nature of modern terrorism in order to respond to it Continue Reading …
Another Reason to Philosophize
Has science destroyed the dream of philosophy? Was Stephen Hawking correct in claiming,“Philosophy is Dead?” These and a few more questions were raised, or more so alluded to in a recent debate by Paul Horwich and Michael P. Lynch in the Stone in March. The two philosophy professors debated the current state of philosophy using Wittgenstein as a platform. Horwich went first, Continue Reading …
Cognitive and Affective Empathy in Moral Sentiment
[DISCLAIMER: Although I am using a conceptual distinction I got from the embedded Simon Baron-Cohen TEDx talk (where ever he got it from), I am not taking a position on his stance on Autism or Psychopathy. I have no point of view about Autism and have reflected on empathy and psychopathy in this blog before, here and here. I'm interested in the constituent parts of empathy Continue Reading …
Paul Fry on Lacan
One of the groovy things about our new "open" society is how venerated institutions of higher learning like Yale are being strong-armed into sharing their course content online with the unwashed masses (aka you and me). This means you don't have to go to The Interwebs or TedX to get quasi scholarly ramblings about your favorite intellectuals or ideas: you can get qualified Continue Reading …
Education Philosophy Becomes Practice
Over the past hundred years Constructivists and Traditionalists have enjoyed an uneasy truce in the world of education practitioners. Constructivism "says that people construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences." [thirteen.org] Traditionalists were more influenced by the "scientific management" Continue Reading …
Sally Haslanger on Social Construction
There are movements in philosophy to focus on the social domain vs. the personal one: groups rather than individuals. This is very well developed in the fields of Feminist and Gender Theory which look at the female/male social constructions and much broader issues including race and justice theory. Taking from philosophers such as Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Luce Continue Reading …
Tolerance, Repression and Terrorism
In 1965 Herbert Marcuse published an article entitled "Repressive Tolerance" in the collection A Critique of Pure Tolerance. The critique of modern society he presents in this paper will not be new to anyone familiar with his work or with the work of others from the first generation of the so-called Frankfurt School: the administered society, the systematic moronization of Continue Reading …
Philosophy as Conceptual Border Patrol
Peter Hacker does not abide nonsense. In his January article "Why Philosophy" Hacker puts in his cross-hairs ideas taken seriously by politicians, scientists, and the intelligentsia in general. Let’s get to the specifics in a minute – the general outline is relevant to anyone hoping to grok the never-ending attempt to define philosophy. Perhaps this attempt never ends because Continue Reading …
What Would an I-Thou Encounter Look Like?
http://youtu.be/SxLIlLzIh2Q A dialogical relation will show itself also in genuine conversation, but it is not composed of this. ...On the other hand, all conversation derives its genuineness only from the consciousness of the element of inclusion—even if this appears only abstractly as an "acknowledgement" of the actual being of the partner in the conversation; but this Continue Reading …
I and Thou: The Spreadsheet!
Regardless of how or whether you relate to Buber's vision, I and Thou makes for a frustrating read. Seemingly simple words are used in new and alien contexts. Solutions are announced rather than derived. Worse, while nominally divided into three parts, I and Thou is really more of a loose collection of 61 aphorisms. Following Buber's reasoning by comparing his different uses of Continue Reading …
Engaging with Buber
In looking for web resources on Buber to blog about, I've come across an interesting phenomenon: there are very few and they are mostly introductory. Every time we do a podcast, I cast the Google net to see if there are interesting, useful or funny things out there on the net I can share with our audience about the subject of the episode. When I did this for I and Thou, the Continue Reading …
The New Breed of Philosophy
Tired of the overwhelming focus on mind/body problems in philosophy? There also is a debate between scientists and philosophers about who is more important and if philosophy really has any use in today's science research. Thankfully, a recent interview in The Atlantic with Tim Maudlin , philosophical cosmologist, brings the two fields back to the basics of philosophy Continue Reading …
Martin Buber and Stephen Darwall
There was some discussion in the recent podcast about how an ethics can be derived from Martin Buber 's I and Thou. Recently one philosopher has pointed to Buber's work as at least an historical antecedent to his theory. The third chapter of Stephen Darwall's 2006 book, The Second-Person Standpoint, opens with the following quote from Buber: When one says You, the I of the... Continue Reading …
The Reincarnation of William James: Eugene Taylor, R.I.P.
Eugene Taylor was only 66 years of age when he passed away on January 30th, 2013. Taylor was a graduate of Southern Methodist University, Harvard Divinity School, and earned his Ph.D. at Boston University. Saybrook University was his academic base but he was also a research historian of psychology at Harvard Medical School, founder of the Cambridge Institute of Psychology and Continue Reading …
Robert Stern on Moral Obligation
One question, but by no means the only question, that we can ask ourselves when reading the great philosophers of the past is what can they tells us about contemporary debates? A recent attempt to show the fruitfulness of bringing history to bear on a contemporary debate is Robert Stern's Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard (hereafter UMO). In UMO Stern Continue Reading …
Zizek and Pop Culture in Philosophy Today
PEL's last episode focused on Karl Marx via The German Ideology. Possibly one of the most famous/infamous Marxists of our time is Slavoj Zizek. Some have called him too extreme to be taken seriously, while others have praised him for his brilliance. A recent article in U.K. based paper The Guardian sheds some light on this interesting character and also discusses an upcoming Continue Reading …
Santa Fe Institute MOOC on Complexity
The Santa Fe Institute has jumped into the massive open online course game, launching "Introduction to Complexity" run by Melanie Mitchell, a professor of computer science at Portland State University and author of Complexity: A Guided Tour. The Santa Fe Institute has done lots of interesting work over the years in complexity, chaos, and emergent systems. One thing I've always Continue Reading …
The Great Divide: Concerning the Battle Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy
[Editor's Note: We're happy here to present a first blog post for us by Rian Mitch (submitted in response to our recent call for more bloggers). Rian was one of the voices on our Deleuze Not School discussion, whom we met when he took us to task via email for our slipshod treatment of Derrida on ep. 51. He consequently has been leading a Derrida Not School group.] A Continue Reading …
Ian Hacking on Probability & Inference
The most recent brough-ha-ha from one of Mark's posts seems to center on rationality and philosophy, but underlying all the stuff in the "new rationality" is understanding the process of updating our current knowledge with new information through Bayes Theorem (LW calls the process belief updating or bayesian updating). Bayes Theorem is both very useful and very interesting Continue Reading …