metaphilosophy
TagIntuitions, Common Sense, and “Earning the Right” to Judgments about Philosophy
“Intuitions and common sense are not, I claim, a good basis on which to reach philosophical conclusions.” (more…)
Improvement in Philosophy over Time
“If Aristotle lived today, there is no way that he would be an Aristotelian.” That winning line is from a recent critique of the history of philosophy by Michael Huemer (Colorado). (more…)
“As science advances, there is more, not less, for philosophy to do”
In a recent interview, Scott Soames, distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, offers up a description of philosophy. It’s a version of one in his recent book, The World Philosophy Made. (more…)
Philosophical Intuitions and Demographic Differences
Philosophers are disagreeing over what lessons should be learned from the growing body of work on the interplay between demographics and philosophical intuitions. (more…)
Philosophy and “The Empirically Tractable”
I think you are right to be suspicious of the tendency of this institutional paradigm to postulate truths that are ‘basic’, ‘ultimate’ or ‘fundamental’ just at the point where things begin to look interesting or problematic from the point of view of those we in the profession pretentiously refer to as ‘non-philosophers’. (more…)
Philosophers as Discoverers of the Unknown (Questions for World Philosophy Day)
“I didn’t even know that was a question I could ask.” (more…)
Common Sense and Philosophical Method
What’s the relationship between common sense and philosophy?
How Do I Figure Out What To Think? (guest post by Martin Lenz)
“Picking a side helps you to play the game. But it doesn’t help you in figuring out what you should think. In other words, in order to work out what to think, you don’t have to pick a side at all.” (more…)
A Way Philosophy Differs from the Other Humanities, or a Caricature of the Humanities?
Professors of the humanities make judgments about value. Art historians, literary scholars, musicologists, and classicists say to our students: These works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange, insightful. They are more worth your time and attention than others… Yet such judgment violates the principle of equality. So humanists have to pretend we’re not do..
The Current State of Early Modern Philosophy
“While no one was looking, contextualism replaced rational reconstructionism (also known as ‘appropriationism,’ ‘presentism,’ and ‘collegialism’) as the dominant methodology among English-speaking early modern historians of philosophy.” (more…)
Agnes Callard’s List of “views that are considered controversial that shouldn’t be”
“There’s no such thing as being good or bad at philosophy.” (more…)
Contemporary Philosophy Is “Only the Most Recent Part of the History of Philosophy”
Why study the history of philosophy? That’s a question Clifford Sosis (Coastal Carolina) asks Peter Adamson (LMU) in a new interview at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher? (more…)
Study on the Personality and Reasoning of Philosophers
A new study is underway to learn about the relationship between personality and reasoning among philosophers. (more…)
A Map of Philosophical Ideas, Works, and Figures
A new visualization of the world of philosophy has been released. Pitched as Google Maps meets PhilPapers, philosophies.space maps philosophy with reference points to subject areas and publications. (more…)
A Map of Correlated Philosophical Positions
Using data from the PhilPapers Surveys, Quentin Ruyant, a post-doc at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has created a map showing the correlation of positions held by philosophers on different philosophical topics. (more…)
How Is Good Public Philosophy Possible?
“When Aristotle said that the intellectual life is one of serious leisure, I believe he was trying to avoid the Scylla of business and the Charybdis of pleasure. If philosophy offered helpful answers to the questions you were asking anyways, it wouldn’t be leisurely; if it added fun to the life you were living anyways, it wouldn’t be serious.” (more…)
Should contemporary philosophers read Ockham? Or: what did history ever do for us? (guest post by Martin Lenz)
“Although we like to think that the pursuit of truth is central, it’s by far not the only reason why debates arise and certain concepts are coined and stick around, while others are forgotten.” (more…)
Naturalism, Science, and the Possibility of Philosophy
“It is perfectly possible to do philosophy (even metaphysics or epistemology) if you do not believe that your views about mind, language, and reality can be used to ground (or dismiss) science.” (more…)
The Structure of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Over Time, Visualized
Created in 1995, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) has grown to become not just an expansive and trusted collection of expertly-written entries on philosophical subjects, but a model for improving the internet. Now Adam Edwards, a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has created an interactive visualization of th..
Philosophy as Modeling
Is the task of philosophizing appropriately characterized as something like the modeling of phenomenon found in the sciences and social sciences, in which there is (supposed to be) a consciousness of the limitations of the models? (more…)
Poetry and Philosophical Thinking
I still hold that there is an important and significant role for traditional forms of philosophy but the question remains, is there something more to philosophical thinking that we can access through engagement with poetry which is filled with rich images, emotional sensitivity and attention to language? (more…)
The “New Questions of Philosophy”
“What subjects are now being confronted at the frontiers of philosophical inquiry, breaking from the familiar philosophical concerns of canonical figures like Plato, Locke, and Descartes?” That was a question raised recently by the editors of “The Masthead,” a new member-based media program at The Atlantic.
Convergence as Progress in Philosophy
One type of evidence that some claim is relevant to determining whether there has been progress in philosophy is whether philosophers have converged on answers to philosophical questions. (more…)
How Philosophy Makes Progress (guest post by Agnes Callard)
Instead of gauging progress by asking what “we” philosophers agree about, one should ask whether someone who wants to do philosophy is in a better position to do so today than she would’ve been 10 or 100 or 1000 years ago? The answer is: certainly. (more…)
Philosophy’s Progress, If You Don’t Care Whether It’s Called Philosophy
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen (GMU) asks, “has there been progress in philosophy?” His answer: “there is significant and ongoing progress in philosophy, we just don’t always name it as such.” (more…)
Does Philosophy of Math Need a Practical Turn?
When we dig beneath the neatly composed surface we find a great buzzing, blooming confusion of ideas, and we have a lot to learn about how mathematics channels these wellsprings of creativity into rigorous scientific discourse. But that requires doing hard work and getting our hands dirty. (more…)
The Absurdity of Philosophy
“There’s something especially absurd about philosophers.”
That’s Helena de Bres, associate professor of philosophy at Wellesley College and comic author, writing about absurdity and philosophy at Aeon.
“We’re Going to Get More, and More Interesting, Kinds of Philosophy”
That’s, uh, me, from a conversation with Daniel Kaufman (Missouri State) on his Sophia program on MeaningOfLife.tv. (more…)