Rorty has died 8 Jun 200724 Nov 2022 The Leiter Report has a brief obit. Richard Rorty was a significant thinker, although I must say that what I learned from his work Philosophy and the MIrror of Nature, I had to unlearn later on. But that is the way of philosophical discussions. More from Telos, courtesy of Mixing Memory. I just heard from those who knew him that he died after a 15 month battle with pancreatic cancer. Until shortly before his death, he was quite active. Logic and philosophy
Humor Jon Stewart is the New Socrates 23 Oct 2007 According to a book mentioned by Greg Dahlman at blog.bioethics.net. He notes that this makes Stephen Colbert Plato. I think it makes Hilary Clinton Aristotle, and Richard Dawkins Epicurus, although the sequence is a bit messed up. Read More
Logic and philosophy Explanation 13 Jul 200718 Sep 2017 But state space models in physical sciences tend to provide not a single coordinate, but a surface over which the system or phenomenon under explanations can range – so long as the observed trajectory of the system is on or near the surface described by the model, there is so far an explanation of the facts. A full explanation would, I think, involve showing in a suitably rich state space that only the actual states are possible, in the order they are observed (which turns out to be a single coordinate in a state space of the dynamical model after all). Read More
Accommodationism The “developmental hypothesis” of belief acquisition 29 Jan 201420 Feb 2014 In the last two posts I have discussed why members of belief-groups have silly beliefs (that is, beliefs that the wider population finds silly), and why those particular beliefs, whatever they are, are the ones they believe. In broad terms, the answer is that these are arbitrary, costly hard-to-fake signals… Read More
I’m not exactly a fan of Rorty, but I’ll still pay him respect. He was indeed a significant thinker, even if a lot of his though was horribly muddled and confused (IMO, at least).