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Philosophy
A.N. Whitehead famously characterized the European philosophical tradition as "a series of footnotes to Plato." Whitehead's quip unfairly trivializes the contributions of the titans of the Western philosophical tradition such as Descartes... 
A.N. Whitehead famously characterized the European philosophical tradition as "a series of footnotes to Plato." Whitehead's quip unfairly trivializes the contributions of the titans of the Western philosophical tradition such as Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, but it is true that the most fundamental questions of philosophy have not changed much since the days of Plato and Aristotle
For example, contemporary social and political philosophers such as Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls still struggle(d) with the philosophical underpinnings of our social and political structures, building on the work of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, and others, but at bottom still reaching for answers to age-old questions of political legitimacy.
Likewise, uncertainty about our very ability to learn anything solid about the outside world has not dissipated much since the epistemological thought experiments of Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Twentieth Century luminaries such as Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida continued to challenge even the basic assumptions of our linguistically-rooted logic itself.
These sources span a wide range of philosophical inquiries and traditions. Some of the bloggers are continentalists, building on the work of the great German philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Others are philosophers of mind, preferring Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege, Putnam, and Quine. Still others defy easy categorization within a philosophical tradition. Give your mind a workout and wander through these great philosophical feeds.
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Morality is made for man, not man for morality -- William K. Frankena.I'm not sure what to make of Frankena's maxim. It's uncontroversial that human welfare is important. So let's interpret the maxim more strongly, as expressing a form of moral conservatism -- a rebuke of the radical and alienating demands...
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[Another post I'm working on reminded me of this note from last September that I never got around to posting...]Is philosophy itself alienating? Excessive concern to achieve the 'view from nowhere' seems like an occupational hazard. Especially if one embraces an 'ideal agent'-type metaethic, this may lead to constantly...
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Interesting.Should philosophy have something to say to non-philosophers? Should philosophy be pursued only by those trained in philosophy? Should academic teachers of philosophy consider themselves philosophers in virtue of the fact that they teach philosophy? And should analytic philosophers deny that continental philosopher...
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Life can be ironic: within a week, I managed to be in New York, US and then in York, UK.It even took me some time to realise the odd coincidence. I must be tired.In York, I gave a presentation at the meetingE-Learning in Dialogue: Innovative Teaching and Learning in Philosophy and Religious Studies.I enjoyed several of the...
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Just replace the elevator-background music with this:http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=pBAasek8NR4and enjoy!Luciano Floridi's blog on the Philosophy of information
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Click on the title.Just replace the elevator-background music with this:http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=pBAasek8NR4and enjoy!Luciano Floridi's blog on the Philosophy of information
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Rachael remarks on the 'structure and similarity' discussion:Should we distinguish between predicates that are projectable and predicates that are natural? "Green", "ultraviolety-looking to bees", "owned by Rachael", and "tasty to alpacas" are fairly projectable, but I doubt they're natural. I don't expect a bee to care...
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Some commenters in the thread on 'structure and similarity' proposed that we should work with whatever concepts we happen to start with -- green rather than grue, or vice versa -- and only change if there's a compelling reason to do so: "I do not have to assume that the way I cut up the world now is the best way (in fact I'm...
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Although Adornoâs Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, published some twenty years after Dialectic of Enlightenment, were regarded as proof of Adornoâs hostility toward political praxis by the generation of the New Left, these texts open up the categories of cognition and subjectivity to the promise of a reconstructe...
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We desire things for reasons. Often we want something because we judge it to be good. The desire thus stems from an evaluative belief, which in turn is answerable to reason. In other cases, the reason for our desire is a brute taste, e.g. the fact that we find the taste of chocolate to be pleasant. We desire chocolate for...
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