Philosophy, et cetera

Inspired by the ignorance of Bill Nye the science guy ... Some things I wish everyone know about philosophy: (1) Descartes' "I ...

What positions (or whole debates) in philosophy do you find most baffling?  For each such case, how confident are you that your bafflement i...

Jason Brennan's ' Scepticism about Philosophy ' raises a very interesting challenge, arguing that "[w]idespread disagreemen...

Which philosophical terms do you think do more to obscure than clarify? Some terms are ambiguous in ways that invite (unintentional) equivoc...

A couple more questions of information architecture : What are blogs good for? And what is the ideal medium for philosophical discussion? ...

One of my best students recently asked how he could further improve his philosophical work. It's something I occasionally wonder for mys...

The value of freedom sometimes calls for constraint: against selling oneself into slavery , for example. Is there an intellectual analogue o...

Clark asks: What are the fundamental issues you are most interested in and see as very important? I've offered such a list before , b...

Haidt and Bjorklund ('Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions about Moral Psychology') suggest a model ('SIM') according t...

After describing how moral philosophers have expended reams of paper debating trolley problems, Hallq concludes : " The confusions of t...

Now that I think of it, a better way to make my point may be to replace talk of 'all or nothing' belief with credences or degrees ...

[Another post I'm working on reminded me of this note from last September that I never got around to posting...] Is philosophy itself al...

A friend passed along the link to this vituperative rant against (a certain kind of) academic philosophy: What possible use or relevance to...

Andrew raised some interesting questions in this week's PhilSoc discussion: why do we care about truth? Is there a risk of 'truthaho...

I take ' Scientism ' to be the view that empirical inquiry is the only form of rational inquiry , perhaps coupled with the even stro...

I've recently lamented how logical formalisms and inductive meta-arguments risk being misused as substitutes for careful thought. It...

[My promised concluding thoughts...] Clearly our disagreements run too deep to do full justice to them in a mere blog post. But I at leas...

Good reasoning is invaluable; it's what philosophy is all about. But I'm more skeptical of formal logic's value. Logic is a powe...

Eric Schwitzgebel raises the question . Moral philosophers are not, in general, any better behaved than "non-ethicists of similar socia...

Given my complaints about the perennial accusation that philosophy never settles anything , I figure it'd be worth offering some exampl...