April 14, 2008
Philosophers' Carnival 67: Idealism
Welcome to the 67th Philosophers' Carnival, on the theme of idealism! A large number of submissions were received, so among those that were not idealism-themed, I have selected only a few of my favorites. My apologies to those that were not included. Also, for those of you who find the color scheme distasteful (or a cause of headaches), let me point you to the top right of the page, where a link reading "view with boring colors" will magically turn this page to black on white (please let me know if it doesn't work in your browser). And now, without further ado, Philosophers' Carnival 67:
What Is Idealism?
I thought it would be appropriate to begin the carnival with a brief note on just what "idealism" is. We are speaking here of metaphysical idealism, the view that minds and/or their ideas are the fundamental stuff of reality and everything else depends on them. The most famous historical proponent of idealism (and the one with perhaps the simplest system) was
George Berkeley (1685-1753). In Berkeley's system, the universe contains many finite minds (us) and one infinite mind (God). The physical world is made up of perceptions which are ideas inserted directly in our minds by God. A current controversy also exists as to whether
G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) was an idealist. Robert Adams argues the Leibniz holds a consistently idealist picture of the world, whereas Daniel Garber argues that in at least some of his writings Leibniz accepts "corporeal substance" as a fundamental entity in his ontology. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) called his theory "transcendental idealism" but denied that this was actually a form of idealism. Later idealists include
G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831),
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), and
F. H. Bradley (1846-1924).
For Idealism
The first group of Carnival submissions are those arguing for idealism, or defending it from objections.
- Richard Brown at Philosophy Sucks! presents Has Idealism Been Refuted? which examines three famous "refutations" of idealism and finds them all to be deficient in various ways.
- Michael Sigrist presents Who's Afraid of Idealism? at The Ends of Thought. I had a bit of difficulty classifying this post, but I've put it here because it argues against conventional notions of realism. Sigrist argues that by adopting a view adapted from Kant and Husserl we can both satisfy our realist intuitions and get the theoretical benefits of idealism.
Against Idealism
The following submissions argue against idealism. As your "impartial" carnival host, I will resist the temptation to offer counter-refutations.
Consequences of Idealism
This group of submissions examines the interaction between idealist positions and arguments and other issues in philosophy.
- Enigman's submission, Atheism and Explanation, compares the negative existence claims of idealism (about matter), atheism (about God), and Humean supervenience (about laws of nature).
- In Language and the Metaphysics of the Material World, I discuss how Berkeley's theory of sense perception as language may provide a useful heuristic for solving some difficult problems in the metaphysics of the material world.
History of Idealism
One submission for this carnival discussed the topic of idealism from a purely historical perspective.
- A submission from Grundlegung is apparently the first part of a series on Hegel and Idealism and discusses the question of in what sense Kant's "transcendental idealism" is idealistic. This provides the foundation for the interpretation of Hegel.
The Best of the Rest
That's all for this time! The next Carnival will be held on April 28 at MQPhil. Submit your posts by Saturday, April 26.
April 02, 2008
Philosophers' Carnival 66
I'm a couple days late with this (my apologies), but Philosophers' Carnival 66 is now up at The Uncredible Hallq with a link to my post, Berkeley: Phenomenalist or Platonist?
The 67th Carnival will be held right here, so stay tuned!
March 27, 2008
The Philosophers' Carnival Returns to blog.kennypearce.net
The 66th Philosophers' Carnival is coming up this Monday at The Uncredible Hallq. The Philosophers' Carnival is a bi-weekly roundup of blog posts on subjects related to academic philosophy including, but not limited to, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, "continental" philosophy and the history of philosophy. Submissions are due online every other Saturday for inclusion in the carnival the following Monday.
Following the Uncredible Carnival 66 this Monday, Philosophers' Carnival 67 will take place here at blog.kennypearce.net on Monday, April 14 (submissions due by Saturday April 12). Some of you may recall that I had previously hosted Philosophers' Carnival 31. The 67th carnival will be focused on the theme of "idealism" - the view that minds and/or their ideas are the fundamental stuff of reality. Posts are invited which argue for or against idealism, which track down the consequences of idealism, or which examine the views of historical idealist philosophers, such as Berkeley, Hegel, Schopenhauer, or Bradley (to name a few). Space permitting, I will include all posts with substantive content related to academic philosophy, but posts related to the theme outlined above are especially welcome and will have pride of place at the top of the page.
If you need some help thinking of something to say about idealism, let me recommend that you read some of my previous posts. For arguments for idealism, see Why Idealism? and The Ontological Economy of Idealism. Also, my more recent post The Idealist Strategy outlines a direction of argument common to most historical idealists (and to the contemporary idealist John Foster). I don't argue against idealism myself (since it's true) but I have dealt with Moorean arguments against it, if only to refute them. Finally, if you have more historical interests you can check my archives on Leibniz, Schopenhauer, and, of course, Berkeley.
Enjoy!
March 18, 2008
January 22, 2008
January 14, 2008
Christian Carnival CCVI
This link is a little late in coming (my apologies), but Jeremy has included my post on hyper-Reformation theology in Christian Carnival CCVI (that's 206 to you barbarians) at Parableman.
January 03, 2008
Blog Year 2007 In Review
The year 2007 on this blog saw over 214,000 visits from over 72,000 distinct users. This is down just slightly from 2006, a trend that I attribute to less regular blogging, and especially less regular carnival submissions, and also to not hosting the philosophers' carnival, which led to a big surge of hits in 2006. Here are the top ten most popular posts:
- June 12, 2006: Philosophers' Carnival XXXI. This post also made third place last year.
- May 2, 2006: "Three Persons, One Substance" - Paradox or Solution?. This post discusses the difficulties in accepting the trinitarian definitions of the councils and Church tradition while holding to a sufficiently strong version of sola scriptura. Although this post is also from 2006, it didn't make the top ten before.
- May 15, 2006: Why is the NSA Data Mining Operation Bad? This post discusses the privacy issues associated with the data mining operation which was reported in 2006, and why we should bother objecting to it.
- March 5, 2006: Rights, Obligations, and Abortion. This post discusses issues at the intersection of libertarianism and Christian ethics, especially as they relate to abortion.
- October 12, 2005: Leibniz on "Efficient" vs. "Final" Causes in Physics: Its Application to God, Science, and Miracles. This post, from clear back in 2005, briefly develops a Leibnizian account of the relationship between theology and science and of miracles.
- November 4, 2005 What Is Judicial Activism? Another 2005er, this post gives a conceptual analysis of the concept of judicial activism, which attempts to apply some descriptive content to the term (rather than merely value judgment), while explaining why we think it is bad. This post is down from number 5 in 2006.
- March 21, 2007: Catholicism and Church History. This very brief post is the highest ranked of those written in 2007! It simply links to a little debate that was going on on another blog, and announces that I intend to continue the debate here. Funny that a post with almost no content should be the highest scorer of those written in 2007...
- May 11, 2006: NSA Domestic Spying Revelations. This post provides a brief summary and link round-up of the reports on the NSA's domestic spying operation. It is a predecessor to number 3 above.
- February 11, 2007: Degrees of Literalness in Bible Translation. This post points out that translations cannot be divided into two camps of "literal translation" and "paraphrase" but, rather, exist on a spectrum of literalness.
- August 6, 2005: Translation of 2 Timothy 2:2. This post discusses the meaning of the prepositions used in the mentioned verse.
Here are the top ten search phrases:
- cotton patch bible
- kenny pearce
- hcsb review
- calvary chapel blog
- the source new testament
- holman christian standard bible
- calvary chapel blogs
- ambiguity in translation
- hcsb translation
- translation transliteration
Interestingly, nearly all of these are about Bible translation, a subject I haven't written much about recently, which may be part of the reason for my decline in hits as well.
Finally, here are the top ten real (non-spam) referrers:
- A Brood Comb Power-Blogroll
- Movement of Existence: Philosophers' Carnival 44
- Better Bibles Blog
- Fides Quaerens Intellectum
- Philosophy Sucks!: 58th Philosophers' Carnival
- The Space of Reasons: The 46th International Philosophers' Carnival
- GetReligion
- Parableman
- BlogCadre: How I Failed the Turing Test
- Siris
December 03, 2007
November 04, 2007
Patristic Carnival V
Patristic Carnival V is up at The God Fearin' Forum, with a link to my post on "Dionysius". It is a truly ecumenical venture, and I recommend that you all check it out.
Notable posts include:
- A collection of quotes on the Eucharist at The Byzantine Anglo-Catholic which is of interest in connection with my last post. I also commend to you the quote from Chrysostom at the bottom which, like most quotes from Chrysostom, is both spiritually deep and practically challenging.
- A summary of St. John of Damascus' "On the Divine Images," a book I have been intending to read for some time now, at For God, For Country, and For Yale. This summary confirms my general suspicion that the early iconodules may not have believed anything that Protestants ought to find objectionable - there is nothing in the summary that I would call idolatrous or otherwise heretical. Furthermore, many of the considerations put forth in favor of icons are similar to some of the considerations I gave against throwing out the baby with the bathwater in our Protestant rejection of the Catholic/Orthodox parctices with regard to saints and icons in my posts, On Icons, and on Worship and Veneration. This makes me all the more interested in reading this book.
October 26, 2007
"The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley"
My paper "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley" is now available on my writings page. An earlier version of this paper served as my undergraduate honors thesis, and a somewhat reduced version of it has been accepted for publication by Religious Studies. I haven't heard anything about what issue it will appear in.
This paper discusses Berkeley's theory that our sense perceptions (especially visual perceptions) form a language by which God communicates with us, and asks how we are to interpret this language. In particular, it argues, against Walter Creery and Kenneth Winkler, that Berkeley's language must have what Winkler calls "vertical signification" - that is, ideas must be able to signify non-ideas - or Berkeley will be stuck in solipsism. (Winkler denies "vertical signification" on p. 21 of Berkeley: An Interpretation; Creery denies that the Berkeley's language has any "referential function" at all on p. 219 of "Berkeley's Argument for a Divine Visual Language," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3 (1972). See my paper, endnote 8.) The paper goes on to discuss a number of ways in which the difficulties in the semantics of this language mirror difficulties in the semantics of human language, and briefly discusses the interpretation of a few specific perceptions.
I have also reorganized my writings page to give a feel for which papers I regard as finished and/or good and which I am currently still working on, rather than just organizing them chronologically or lumping them all together. Go check it out.
July 26, 2007
Tagged! 8 Things You Never Wanted to Know About Me
I've been tagged by The God Fearin' Fiddler. I've seen these things go around before, but I've never actually been tagged myself, so I suppose I'd better play along. Here are the rules:
The rules are simple…Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.
So here are my 8 facts. I've connected each of the 8 facts to a blogger who I am tagging (because I'm trying to connect them, not all of these facts are that weird or obscure):
- I have had for about ten years now the following somewhat compulsive habit: I go to used book stores and purchase every multi-author science-fiction anthology published before 1960. I also buy and read plenty of other science-fiction books, but I do that less compulsively. Jeremy Pierce (Parableman) is also a science-fiction fan (though I'm not aware of him or anyone else sharing my particular compulsion).
- My family lives in Palouse, Washington, about 65 miles south of Spokane where, I understand, Wayne Leman (Better Bibles Blog) is now located.
- Although I'm a vocal political proponent of gun rights, I've never owned a firearm, and the only handgun I've ever fired was a .22 revolver (I have used rifles and shotguns somewhat larger than that). If you want to know about guns, you should talk to Jeff the Baptist.
- When Jeff the Baptist got married, John the Methodist (Locusts and Honey) held a bad advice competition for him. I harbor the secret hope that he will do the same for me and perhaps, even, that someone will produce a worse piece of advice than Tony! (Ok, so it's not a secret hope any more. By the way, our date is August 2, 2008.)
- I've only ever been to four countries in my life, and that's counting my two layovers in Frankfurt airport as a trip to Germany! (The other three counries are the US, Canada, and Greece.) Chris Tilling (Chrisendom), on the other hand, not only lives in Germany but even has a .de domain!
- Despite having spent a great deal of time studying and thinking about the philosophy of George Berkeley, I have yet to read the Siris, which provided the name for Brandon Watson's blog.
- I often read many books at once. Currently, I am reading no less than five. These are the following (in no particular order): The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, ed. Bernard McGinn; Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison; Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A .V. Miller; Milton's Paradise Lost; and Clement of Alexandria's Paedagogos (in the original Greek). Suzanne McCarthy (Suzanne's Bookshelf) has also recently been analyzing her reading habits.
- I regularly receive spam messages that think I'm a pastor. They promise to do various things, such as improve my church's small group ministry. I find this rather amusing. Pastor Shaun (Postscript Posthaste) is, on the other hand, a real pastor.
June 28, 2007
Introducing Guest-Blogger Lauren!
So, now that I've started blogging regularly again (at least for the last three days or so), I'm leaving town and going to be away from the computer for about five days. However, there is good news! This, I think, will be an excellent opportunity to hand over the reins to my lovely fiance, Lauren. (I expect she will continue to blog occasionally after I come back, but I figured this was a good time to start.) Lauren is entering her senior year at Penn, majoring in physics, math, and philosophy. She's been instructed to stick roughly to the general subject areas ordinarily discussed on this blog (but that can be interpreted a bit broadly), so I'm hoping she'll tell us about some of the philosophical insights we can get from physics, or vice versa. Additionally, Lauren, like me, is an amateur Bible scholar/theologian, and often picks up things I miss in these areas. In particular, she is much more knowledgable than I on the subject of Reformation-era theology (this probably has something to do with her Presbyterian pedigree). Political issue are, of course, always on-topic on this blog as well.
Lauren and I met through Campus Crusade for Christ at Penn. The wedding is set for August 2, 2008.
June 25, 2007
Detecting Java WebStart on Internet Explorer
So, I haven't posted very much recently, not for any particularly important reason, but simply because I've been doing other things with my free time. The next few days I have very little to do, however (I'm on vacation back in Washington state), and so I'm hoping to get a few things posted that I've been meaning to post. The first of these is a little off the usual topic of this blog, but I think it will be of interest if not to my usual readers, at least to those who find it on google.
At work last week, I discovered a technique for detecting the presence of Java WebStart on MS Internet Explorer 6 and 7 using JScript and ActiveX. My fellow web developers will know that Internet Explorer is not compatible or compliant with anything. It ignores essentially all standards, and the useful and secure techniques for doing things like detecting plugins on other browsers generally won't work. Meanwhile, the things that do work on Internet Explorer don't work anywhere else. The following code snippet, however, successfully detects the presence of Java WebStart on (at least) Firefox for Windows, Gecko (Mozilla)-based Linux browsers, Safari for Mac, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 for Windows. It doesn't seem to work with the Linux browser Konqueror. On IE6, it works without a hitch on default security settings. IE7 gives the "active content" warning and until permission is given WebStart will not be detected. Here it is:
function testWebstart(){
var webstart = 'unknown';
//standards-compliant browsers
if(navigator.mimeTypes && navigator.mimeTypes.length > 1){
if(navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-java-jnlp-file']){
webstart = true;
}else{
webstart = false;
}
}
//Microsoft Browsers
if(webstart == 'unknown'){
try{
var test = new ActiveXObject("JavaWebStart.isInstalled");
webstart = true;
}catch(e){
webstart = false;
}
}
return webstart;
}
The function returns the string 'unknown' if the status cannot be determined. Otherwise, it returns a boolean indicating whether WebStart is installed. I don't know what, if anything, the ActiveX object created by the code can be used for; I just found it by looking through the Windows registry and decided to give it a try.
April 24, 2007
March 12, 2007
Philosophers' Carnival 44 is Up
Philosophers' Carnival 44 is now up at Movement of Existence with a link to my recent post on the Grandfather Paradox.
February 21, 2007
New Philosophers' Carnival Up!
The latest Philosophers' Carnival is now up at This is the Name of This Blog (don't you just love analytic philosophy humor?) with a link to my two posts on the nature of love.
February 17, 2007
blog.kennypearce.net: Now With Boring Colors!
As of right now, users of this blog have access to a new feature: boring colors! Seriously, though, I was trying to print something off this blog so that it was readable on a white background and realized this was a non-trivial task. This combined with the fact that people have often complained about my site being difficult to read has motivated me to finally create a feature to view the site with a more normal stylesheet. Clicking "View With Boring Colors" on the top right of any page should cause the page to appear in black on white. Reloading the page will bring it back to green on black, as will navigating to another page. It's been tested only slightly, but seems to work on Mozilla derivatives (such as Firefox) and Konqueror (the KDE web browser on Linux) but not Safari.
February 15, 2007
January 08, 2007
January 03, 2007
Blog Year 2006 in Review
The year 2006 on this blog saw over 265,000 visits from nearly 95,000 unique users. Here are the top ten most popular posts (note: there is some margin of error here, as a configuration change part way through the year caused some posts to be accessible at two URLs, screwing up the statistics):
- May 30, 2006: More Comment Spam Reconfiguration. People must be finding this on search engines thinking it will help them eliminate spam from their own blogs (although none of the top ten searches get you here, so everyone must be searching with a different phrase). Kinda sad that that's enough to make it number one, isn't it? Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.
- October 6, 2005: Ronald Dworkin on John Roberts and Principles of Constitutional Interpretation. A brief review of an article by political philosopher Ronald Dworkin on some statements John Roberts made during his confirmation hearings, also containing a few remarks on Dworkin's book Sovereign Virtue.
- June 12, 2006: Philosophers' Carnival XXXI. You knew that one had to make the list. There was actually a quite substantial spike in the number of visits in June and July as a result of the Philosophers' Carnival being hosted here, though the increase in pages viewed, hits, and bandwidth is pretty steady throughout the year, maxing in December. The Philosophers' Carnival is, of course, always worth a look, regardless of who is hosting.
- January 9, 2006: The Holman Christian Standard Bible. My first look at the HCSB, which is now my primary Bible translation. Compares the HCSB and NKJV renderings of three verses where I think the traditional translations are flawed.
- November 4, 2005: What Is Judicial Activism? An attempt to form a descriptive, rather than merely normative, account of just what 'judicial activism' is, and why it is undesirable. I'm glad to see that this is still one of my most viewed posts, over a year after I wrote it, since I think it is one of my better ones, and it is also an important subject for voters to be thinking clearly about.
- November 21, 2005: Ivy League Elitist ... Porn? A report on the Penn Student Activities Council decision to fund Quake Magazine, a "literary erotica" magazine created and published on Penn's campus. (As far as I know, the magazine is still around and still funded - the last thing I saw about it was a poster asking for submissions at the beginning of last semester.) The inclusion of this post on this list is probably a search engine accident (see the tenth most searched term, below).
- November 28, 2005: Can the New Testament be Both Influenced by Plato and Inspired by God? A discussion of the influences of prior literature on the New Testament writers, and the significance of this to the doctrine of divine inspiration.
- December 7, 2004: An Internal Critique of the Beth Stroud Case. A discussion of what was done right and what was done wrong in the handling of the case of Beth Stroud, the youth minister at First United Methodist of Germantown in Philadelphia. This post is now over two years old. According to Ms. Stroud's own web page the situation has not changed much.
- January 7, 2006: Christianity and Aristotelian Metaphysics. This post discusses the influence of Aristotle on Christian theology (from a decidedly unsympathetic perspective). I am no longer convinced that the use of hupostasis in the Chalcedonian Declaration is from Aristotle; it seems more likely to me that it comes from Neo-Platonism. In addition to the fact that there was a significant amount of cross-pollination, as it were, between early Christianity and Neo-Platonism, some Neo-Platonists spoke of the fundamental principles of the universe (at a deeper level even than the Forms) being the "three hupostases." The three are "The One," "Mind," and "Soul," which is interesting because Mind (nous) is "that which thinks or reasons" and Word (logos, as in John 1) can mean reason (as an abstract noun), and also because in some contexts Soul (psuche) can be a synonym for Spirit (pneuma), though Paul uses them differently, and I think Plato does as well. So this post may not be entirely correct, but it is still interesting subject matter.
- April 12, 2006: The Language of Athenian Democracy in the New Testament. A discussion of the New Testament's usage of the words ekklesia and kerux in relation to the usage of those words in classical Athens.
And here are the top ten search phrases:
- cotton patch bible
- holman christian standard bible
- http //blog.kennypearce.net
- calvary chapel blog
- hcsb review
- calvary chapel blogs
- kenny pearce
- christian naturalism
- moral idealism
- ivy league porn (link omitted)
Finally, here are the top ten real referrers (as opposed to the ones spoofing the system to appear to be referrers):
- Leiter Reports
- Philosophers' Carnival
- Parableman
- Philosophy, et cetera
- GetReligion
- Better Bibles Blog
- Philosophers' Carnival #24 at Rad Geek
- SmartChristian.com
- Suzanne's Bookshelf
- Philosophers' Carnival #32 at Adventures in Ethics and Science
On the whole, not a bad year!
November 07, 2006
Philosophers' Carnival 38
I'm extremely swamped right now (in the second round of midterms, and in tech week for Othello) and don't have time to post anything substantive, or keep up on what's going on on the other blogs I ordinarily read, for which I apologize. I do however, want to point all of your attention to Philosophers' Carnival 38 which is up at The Splintered Mind with a link to my post on Moore's "two hands" argument for the existence of the physical world.
August 23, 2006
July 24, 2006
July 19, 2006
July 04, 2006
June 13, 2006
Poll: Is My Color Scheme Too Hard to Read?
I like my color scheme. It looks like an old computer terminal, which I think is kind of neat. I can read it fine, myself. However, since I posted the the Philosophers' Carnival here yesterday, I've had two different people (Clark at Mormon Metaphysics in his post linking to the carnival, and play_jurist, commenting on the carnival itself) comment that the text is too difficult to read. So, what I want to know is, how many people think the blog in its current format is hard to read? If a lot of people do, I'd like to get a feel for whether it varies by person, or by platform/browser (perhaps it looks different in some browsers and is harder to read - if so, I might be able to fix it without abandoning the color scheme altogether). So if everyone could let me know in the comments here whether you find this blog difficult to read in its present green-on-black format, and what browser and operating system you use, it would be much appreciated. Thanks.
PS: Perhaps people would also like to tell me whether they are over or under the age of 25, so we can see whether I've perhaps discovered a visual equivalent to the mosquito ringtone! (Only sort of joking about that...)
June 12, 2006
Philosophers' Carnival XXXI!
Greetings one and all, and welcome to blog.kennypearce.net and the 31st Philosophers' Carnival!
The Philosophers' Carnival is an every-few-weekly compilation of philosophy posts from blogs all over the web. The next Philosophers' Carnival is scheduled for July 3rd, and is still in need of a host! If you would like to host Philosophers' Carnival XXXII, visit the hosting guidelines then contact Richard Chappell of Philosophy, etc. to volunteer.
Today's Philosophers' Carnival contains a truly fantastic collection of deep and insightful posts which will be divided into the three traditional sub-divisions of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology (including logic/dialectic), and ethics (including political philosophy). Within each category the posts appear in approximate order of submission. As philosophy is a very hard thing to define and categorize, a couple of posts have had to be squeezed into categories they don't fit very well in. In these cases I've attached an explanation of why I put them where I did. I have also included my responses to each of the entries, in the hope of facilitating continuing philosophical discussion.
- Metaphysics
- Dr. Justin Good of Design Observer discusses an interesting blend of metaphysics, aesthetics, ecology, modernism and wind farms (!) in his post "What is Beauty? Or, On the Aesthetics of Wind Farms." Discussing the opposing views on the aesthetic value (or lack thereof) of wind farms, Dr. Good concludes that "what at first looks like two subjective impressions of the same visual image turns out to be two different understandings of order in the world." The core of the argument is that our aesthetic sensibilities are deeply dependent on our understanding of nature around us. This does indeed seem to me to be an astute and substantially correct observation: in some sense, the natural world - the world around us 'as it should be' - is a paradigm of beauty by which other things are measured. Differing ideas about nature lead to differing ideas about beauty, but, as Dr. Good points out, this doesn't necessarily make beauty a purely subjective idea, because the ecological facts are quite objective.
- Joe Kissel has posted a discussion of Zeno's Paradoxes on Interesting Thing of the Day. There is a long and interesting discussion of just what Zeno intended to prove and how this was supposed to support the Eleatic (Parmenidean) system of metaphysics as a whole. A very good read.
- A post at On Philosophy develops a detailed and rigorous account of causation, complete with diagrams and formal logic. The theory is given briefly as "if we are looking for causes for event X at time T then Y is a cause of X if and only if removing Y from the universe at time T would result in the failure of X to occur." In other words, it is a temporally-sensitive account of necessary (as opposed to sufficient) causation.
- Steve Esser of Guide to Reality discusses, the definition of physicalism/materialism, and relations between entities at different ontological levels. The key question seems to be whether someone who allows that worlds in which non-physical entities or relations "strongly supervene" on (i.e. arise with metaphysical necessity from) physical entities are physically possible should be considered a physicalist. As Steve observes, it is very interesting - and a far cry from the popular/naive version of the modern scientific worldview - that physicalist/materialist philosophers are recognizing the need to allow for the existence (on a lesser ontological level) of "relations (or entities) which go beyond current or contemplated physics."
- Kevin Winters of Heideggerian Denken discusses the way of phenomenology, a very interesting discussion of the process of Heideggerian phenomenological investigation (a subject with which I am not terribly familiar). While I am generally sympathetic to the idea of arguing first and foremost from phenomena/experience (see my own contribution below), I must say that I can't see how Kevin can claim that "logic is not ontologically fundamental" and then talk about "presenting a coherent case." I would like to hear why he wants to, and how he can, present a coherent case (by which I assume he means a logical argument) if experience is more fundamental than logic. Of course, such is the nature of continental philosophy, and those of us more in the analytic tradition have always had difficulty comprehending it (when we have bothered to take the effort, which hasn't been often enough).
- PathEffect blogs on, well, everything. I'm an appreciater of the Parmenidean overtones. (If I had studied more contemporary philosophy, I would probably also have intelligent and insightful remarks to make contrasting PathEffect's version of modal realism with that of David Lewis but, alas, I am underqualified for this task.)
- I present "The Foundational Argument of Berkeleian Metaphysics." This truly spectacular post needs no introduction, should be read by everyone everywhere, and has no flaws whatsoever. I'm lying. (And also starting to sound like Isaac Asimov.) Actually, this post briefly discusses the argument George Berkeley uses to establish the foundations of his metaphysical theory. It could use some situating within the broader scheme of Berkeley's works and general view of the world, which is something I may tackle in future posts.
- Dr. Alan Rhoda of Analyzer discusses the relationship between indeterminacy and libertarian free will. The post argues (correctly, I think) that as far as libertarian free will is concerned, determinism and indeterminism are on roughly equal footing.
- Epistemology
- Chris Hallquist of The Uncredible Hallq discusses whether theories and propositions can be simultaneously unfalisifiable and falisfied. Chris argues that, counter-intuitively, they can. This happens in the case when there are observations which ought to falsify the claim, and those observations are made, but the supporters of the claim keeps supporting it anyway. While Chris is correct that those who charge others with making unfalsifiable claims that have been falsified are not necessarily caught in internal contradiction, these people are nonetheless speaking sloppily. The creationists in Chris's example ought to say to the evolutionists (and some of them do, in fact, say things like this): "the weight of the evidence is against your theory, yet no evidence will suffice to persuade you to reject it." To say that the theory is unfalisifiable yet falsified is sloppy and misleading because the unfalsifiable claim and the (allegedly) falsified one are not really the same: the (allegedly) falsified claim is a matter of science dependent on evidence, but the unfalsifiable claim is a matter of blind faith.
- A post at A Brood Comb argues for philosophy as comprehension. Although this is, of course, meta-philosophy (for which I have not created a category), I've categorized it as epistemology since it talks a lot about the practice of thinking critically about human understanding.
- Sam Douglas of Philosophy Hurts Your Head discusses the connection between mind and meaning. In particular, Kripke's account of meaning as having to do with passing certain speech-act tests is juxtaposed with Chalmer's 'zombie' [aka 'functional isomorph'] argument in a fascinating discussion of the question of whether an entity with no subjective experience of the world can actually 'mean' something by its words.
- Clayton Littlejon of Think Tonk discusses the circumstances under which we ought to believe propositions, in light of Moore's Paradox. Since I'm not familiar with Moore's Paradox, and neither Wikipedia nor The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an entry on it, I don't have much to say here. Perhaps someone would like to further enlighten us on the various paradoxes and thought experiments Clayton refers to.
- DuckRabbit has a post discussing our reasons for valuing truth, in conversation with some pragmatist thinkers. He argues that there is some confusion between truth and belief in this discussion, so that it's not clear what we actually value. As a commenter pointed out (sparking a long discussion), this already quite insightful post could benefit from more discussion about degrees of uncertainty in our beliefs: that is, most of the post seems to assume that belief is an "all or nothing" sort of thing.
- David Corfield of Philosophy of Real Mathematics discusses Robert Brandom's recent John Locke Lectures in Oxford on his "objective pragmatism" and Wittgensteinian language-games and so forth. The post makes interesting application of the author's philosophy of mathematics focus to the subject at hand.
- Doctor Logic discusses causation, on a verificationist epistemology, arguing that the Principle of Sufficient Reason is meaningless. The discussion is definitely worth reading, but if you're not a verificationist, don't expect to be convinced.
- Ethics
- Alex Gregory of atopian.org argues against the idea of 'human rights' as a fundamental ethical principle. Alex's argument is that due to the uncertainty of the actual world, rules like "thou shalt not kill," interpreted to mean that one must not cause the death of another human being, on a human rights interpretation will make it wrong for us to interact with other people, since the interaction will introduce a possibility that we might cause the death of the other person, and we are not permitted to gamble with the rights of others, no matter how good the odds. In order to defend non-consequentialism in general, one might introduce intention and knowledge as relevant factors in the ethical status of an action, and this can also be used in a human rights theory to serve for the foundation of a libertarian political philosophy. However, the way in which this weakens human rights (it is not possible for someone to violate your rights unintentionally, at least in the type of violation that makes the violator morally culpable) is troubling.
- Francois Trembloy of Goosing the Antithesis presents part one of his series The Morality Disconnect, a reflection on the reasons why most atheists insist on fact in virtually every field, but operate on a relativistic "true for you" model in morality. This post is part of The War on Relativism, with which I was not previously familiar; allow me to insert here that the idea of a movement in opposition to moral relativism among atheists/secularists seems to me to be an extremely good thing for the future of intelligent discourse on ethical issues.
- Eteraz of Unwilling Self-Negation discusses the varying responses to Wahhabism available to traditionalist and 'pragmatic post-modernist' Muslims, and argues in favor of the post-modernist response. Eteraz states that, while traditionalist Muslims must give complicated arguments and often use questionable reasoning in order to condemn Wahhabi terrorism, the pragmatic post-modernist has an easier time because "The fundamental belief of a pragmatic postmodernist is that a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought of worth dying for, by people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing more than the fact that we have belief in it." Of course, it is not clear how this view is supposed to persuade anyone, it just states (as a fundamental assumption) that it is ok for us to continue believing that terrorism is wrong and deserves to be punished, even though we (allegedly) have no justification for that belief. I can't say I find this very satisfying.
- Professor Laurence Thomas argues at moralhealth.com that "good will" between citizens is a prerequisite for successful democracy, but notices with puzzlement that, although there is more equality today than at any other time in US history (world history?), good will seems to be decreasing. He concludes that "there is no logical connection between good will and equality." Of course, a libertarian (e.g., me) might argue that good will is actually inversely related to the prevalence of egalitarian politics, since the latter leads the poor to believe that others' hard-earned (and not-so-hard-earned) wealth is rightfully theirs and was somehow stolen from them, and puts the rich in the position of having their money confiscated by the poor, thus creating more rather than less opposition between socio-economic classes, and decreasing good will in society as a whole. When we had a lot of good will between people in America, we had a culture in which people were ashamed to accept government handouts and sincerely wanted to work hard and contribute to earn their own living. The welfare system has gone a long way toward destroying this.
- Professor Steve Gimbel, in his post "Help, Help, I'm Being Oppressed!" at The Philosophers' Playground, discusses the criteria for oppression. Does it require intention? If a policy is implemented for good reasons, but happens to negatively effect an identifiable ethnic or socio-economic group, or one gender, disproportionately to others, is that oppression? Or what if a certain group just happens to be below-average in society according to some metric? I remember in the last US presidential election the Green Party candidate David Cobb arguing in a debate with Libertarian Michael Badnarik that the death penalty must be abolished permanently because it was racist and classist and therefore oppressive. Of course, Cobb's insistence that the death penalty was "inherently" racist and classist (and not just racist and classist right now due to biased implementation) is probably racist and classist itself, since it assumes that it will always be the case that most capital offenses are committed by lower-class members of ethnic minorities (a rather offensive notion - but maybe Cobb didn't mean it and simply doesn't understand the meaning of the word 'inherent'), but it is true that today many more poor black people are executed than rich white people. Does that in itself make the death penalty racist/classist? I tend to think that in this case it is pretty obvious that there is only oppression in the application of the death penalty if a greater proportion of poor black people convicted of capital crimes receive the death penalty, compared to convicted rich white people (and I remember reading somewhere that this IS the case in the US right now), but Professor Gimbel's post demonstrates that these issues are much more complicated than many people on both sides tend to think.
- Speaking of discrimination/oppression and capital punishment (no, I didn't leave the submission order to put these two posts next to each other), David at Sago Boulevard discusses an argument by Earnest van den Haag that "If the death penalty is morally just, however discriminatorily applied to only some of the guilty, it remains just in each case in which it is applied." In other words, if it is morally legitimate to execute those convicted of murder by a jury of their peers, then this legitimacy is not undermined if only some convicted murderers are executed and the decision of which convicted murderers to execute is made in a discriminatory fashion. David seems skeptical. Personally, I tend to think that, granting the antecedent, it is not unjust to execute those who are executed, but it is unjust not to execute the others. At any rate, we seem to have a pretty strong moral inuition that selective or capricious application of penalties is unjust.
- Richard Chappell in Philosophy, etc. wonders if there is objective, rational ground for our culture's almost universal moral condemnation of public sexual displays. He discusses several possible justifications and finds them all more or less inadequate. I would propose this line of reasoning: my mind is mine, and there are some things that I choose not to take into it. I act intentionally to avoid these things. If I have a personal objection to seeing something or other (say, for simplicity's sake, nudity in general), and I am somewhere where I have a reasonable expectation not to see nudity, and you walk by me naked, it seems that a case can be made that I am somehow violated or invaded by this. Of course, the 'reasonable expectation' part makes this culturally relative again, and so doesn't really answer Richard's question. It is more to the point to ask why I object to seeing these things in the first place, and this will take us deep into philosophical psychology. To make a brief suggestion: if we think about the very general type of philosophical psychology found in Plato, Paul, and Augustine, we might say that seeing this particular type of sight strengthens the 'bad part' of the soul (the 'money-loving soul' in Plato; the 'flesh' in Paul and Augustine) and causes it to rebel against the good part (the 'wisdom-loving soul' in Plato; the 'spirit' in Paul and Augustine). Of course, we will want to be careful not to become completely prude and make sexual desire evil (as, I understand, Augustine does), but rather to say that the types of sights we object to are those which direct our sexual desires onto improper objects (and we all agree that at least some persons are improper objects of sexual desire - children are the most obvious example). Since this means that viewing certain types of sexual behaviors - or even simple nudity - can perceivably be damaging to the proper order of the psyche, we can go back again to the first argument and say that to engage in public sexual acts violates the personal autonomy of those who view it unwillingly by denying them the opportunity to determine for themselves which things are and are not destructive for them personally, and to avoid the destructive things.
- Hell's Handmaiden critiques a statement recently released by the Witherspoon Institute on the social effects of marriage. The criticism is essentially that the statement isn't what it pretends to be - an objective and cross-cultural look at the effects of the redefinition of marriage currently going on in the US - but rather presupposes certain goals for marriage which amount to question-begging in the broader argument.
June 07, 2006
Christian Carnival CXXV at Random Acts of Verbiage
Christian Carnival CXXV is now up at Random Acts of Verbiage with a link to my post on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
June 05, 2006
Philosophers' Carnival #31 Reminder
Just a reminder: Philosophers' Carnival #31 will be hosted right here at blog.kennypearce.net on Monday, June 12, one week from today! Any philosophy-related blog post is eligible for inclusion, so get those submissions in! The submission deadline is midnight, US Eastern time, next Sunday night.
May 30, 2006
More Comment Spam Configuration
So I've discovered that by increasing my comment spam filter's aggressiveness by .1 I can eliminate nearly all spam (I was getting a whole bunch of spam which the filter scored at exactly 0 and referred to me for moderation, and it was clogging my email box like mad). The downside is that certain non-spam messages will also get junked, and MovableType will direct the user to a page that says the comment was 'held for moderation' rather than junked. When I get a chance (probably next week) I'll work on getting a more accurate message up there. For now keep in mind that the most common mistake of the spam filter is this: if you have never commented on this blog with your email address before (or if you do not enter an email address) and you put any links in your post (including linking your web-site in the 'URL' box), your comment will almost certainly be junked. Therefore, to avoid the spam filter, please do not include any links in your first post. Thanks.
May 26, 2006