On philosophical practice 8 Aug 2009 One might well want to ask how seriously this doctrine is intended, just how strictly and literally the philosophers who propound it mean their words to be taken. … It is, as a matter of fact, not at all easy to answer, for strange though the doctrine looks, we are sometimes told to take it easy—really it’s just what we’ve all believed all along. (There’s the bit where you say it, and the bit where you take it back.) [J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, p2] Philosophy Quotes Quotes
Biology Does life exist? 11 Jan 2014 Life, I believe, is what physics does on one particular planet on a Wednesday. More exactly, it is a series of chemical and physical dynamics that occurs between 3.85 billion years ago and now on this planet. Ferris Jabr, an editor at the Scientific American site, has a piece entitled “Why… Read More
History Wittgenstein, transformation, and evolution 31 Jul 201131 Jul 2011 Reposted from my first blog, and edited. When Wittgenstein collaborated for a period with Friederich Waismann, the outcome was an unpublished book, Logik, Sprache, Philosophie. He was working his way from the logical atomism of the Tractatus to the holism of the Philosophical Investigations. They wrote: Our thought here marches with certain views… Read More
Philosophy Advice to a student about essays 5 Jan 20235 Jan 2023 In between my absent career path, I just wrote this in reply to a student who wanted advice on their assignments, as they got around 70% for the subject I just taught them. Many of my students were science or STEM students, and essays are hard for them. This is… Read More
It’s more like we’re a mafia: you’re family, we’re always on your side, and we’ll attend your funeral and support your widow after we’ve stabbed you in the back.
As anybody who reads Internet comment threads knows, any slightly novel idea will be instantly attacked–political correctness is only one dimension of the system of social surveillance that ensures that discourse will flow in narrow canals with steep banks. Since one of the traditional roles of philosophers is to try to find genuinely knew things to say and think, it’s small wonder if they are a bit gun shy, ergo the putting it out and taking it back bit. Of course most new ideas really are worthless or even dangerous, but if you’re going to have such things at all, somebody has to launch the trial balloon.
I read it from the top, getting the content before I got to the date (Austin died in 1960; “S and S” was based on notes for lectures given in the 1950s). What came to mind was David Lewis’s defense of realism about possible worlds in the “Foundations” chapter of his “Counterfactuals,” which famously begins with a claim that “we’ve all believed all along” something he identifies with possible world realism.
I posted a comment on Pharyngula a couple of weeks ago regarding notions of good and bad being socially constructed rather than empirically derived. I was skewered by a few for being stupid and childish, though none actually backed their opposition with refuting substance.
It is often the case that more pragmatically minded people think philosophical argument is stupid, and not worth the consideration. The idea that right and wrong are somehow objective facets of the universe is widespread. They must never have read their Mackie…
Apparently, we’re all down here in the garden of good and evil, and it’s midnight. But would there be any good or evil on earth if there were no humans here? How about only one human? It must have been the arrival of Eve…