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
Evolution Could God Have Set Up Darwinian Accidents? 9 Jul 20119 Jul 2011 I have a paper forthcoming in the Theology and Philosophy journal Zygon, that I thought some of the readers of this blog might find interesting. Here’s the PhilPapers entry: John S. Wilkins (forthcoming). Could God Have Set Up Darwinian Accidents? Zygon. Charles Darwin, in his discussions with Asa Gray and in… Read More
Academe David Hull is dead 6 Nov 2010 Updated to include new links… My mentor, hero and I hope friend, David Lee Hull died on the morning of 11 August 2010, at the age of 75. If not for the fact that David marked my masters thesis and remarked that he hoped to see some of it published,… Read More
Epistemology How hard is the Hard Problem? 14 Nov 201214 Nov 2012 It’s one of those things. You are thinking about a topic and then you see it everywhere. I was chatting to a friend about the Hard Problem and it pops up in a couple of items in my newsfeed. First Marion Stamp Dawkins begins a defence of animal welfare in… 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…