Recently Scott Soames wrote two books on the history of philosophy from 1900 to 1970. Richard Rorty’s review of these books in the LRB has attracted quite a bit of attention among philosophers. A reply by Soames has been printed, but apparently it was cut down quite a bit for space reasons. So a full version of Soames’s reply (warning: PDF) has been put on the web. I expected I’d be rather sympathetic to Soames’s side of this debate, but actually I thought Rorty got in some surprisingly good points, the most central of which were about my primary area of research, vagueness.
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Brian
There is a philosophical tradition, most prominently associated with Quine, that includes among its core commitments the following two claims.
- The things that best scientific theory quantifies over exist
- Among the things that exist, there do not exist spooks or souls or certainly not imaginary friends
So it would be a little troubling if best scientific theory started quantifying over imaginary friends. But some say that’s what will happen. The Quineans will have to find some way to paraphrase away the imaginary friends without paraphrasing away the benefits, should the benefits be genuine.
Karen Bennett (Philosophy, Princeton) reports that Harry Frankfurt is scheduled to be on The Daily Show, presumably promoting his book On Bullshit. The date is now set to be March 14, though that doesn’t seem to be absolutely certain. Non-philosophers should feel free to be less overjoyed with excitement at a philosopher getting this much attention, but I think it’s rather fun, and that episode won’t end up being one of the Daily Shows that I miss – or fastforward through the interview.
UPDATE: Scott McLemee has a nice review of On Bullshit, together with a discussion of Gerry Cohen’s reply, at Inside Higher Ed.
Like Ted, I sometimes worry about whether the blogging medium is being used to its full potential. Then I stumble across uses for the medium that reaffirm my faith in it. 1000 Bars is, as the name suggests, the story of one drinker’s quest to drink at 1000 different bars in 12 months. He is well on the way, with 189 in the first 41 days of the year. I’ll be following his progress, and the pithy summaries of the decor, crowd and ambience of various fine drinking establishments. When taken in large quantities the bar reports all start to sound the same, and they have a pleasing relaxing effect, which is a marked contrast to some political blogs I used to know.
One of the striking things about the tsunami coverage here in Melbourne has been how much of it has focussed on religion. The recent op-eds in The Age have been full of people arguing about how, or whether, religious views can accommodate tragedies such as we’ve seen in south Asia. Since I’ll be teaching the Problem of Evil as part of philosophy 101 this spring (using God, Freedom and Evil as the primary text), I’ve been following these discussions with some interest. I was surprised to find one of the responses I always dismissed as absurd actually has a little more bite to it when I actually tried thinking about it.
Since it’s the season for spreading good news stories, here’s a delightful story about Pedro Martínez and the resources he’s put back into his home town of Manoguayabo. It’s easy to feel jealous (or worse) towards sports stars for all the money they earn, but these feelings are hard to maintain when the star does so much good with the money.
For years Pedro has been my favourite player on my favourite (non-Australian) sporting team, and it was rather sad when he left so he could get more money from the New York Mets. But it’s hard to feel bad about Pedro getting the extra $13 million or so the Mets were offering when so much of it will be returned to Manoguayabo.
Kevin Drum links to Thomas Krannawitter’s interesting defence of Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence. Apparently he’s the best Supreme there is because only he understands that all rights come from God. In the course of putting forward this good Christian view, Krannawitter makes the following charitable interpretative claim.
By 1986, liberal Justice William Brennan could easily dismiss the Constitution out of hand because it belonged “to a world that is dead and gone.”
Hmmm, is that what Brennan really said? Here’s what I think is the source of this quote.
We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time? For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.
Yeah I’d say that talking about its genius and great principles amounts to “dismissing the Constitution”.
I was looking at Peter King’s website, especially his book One Hundred Philosophers and I thought this passage on David Lewis was delightful.
Lewis’ philosophical interests were broad, as evidenced by the contents of the five volumes of his collected papers published so far: ethics, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, language – he wrote on a vast range of subjects, from holes to worlds, from Anselm to Mill, from the mind to time travel. In everything he wrote he was rigorous, committed, and clear, but perhaps the most distinctive thing about him was his attitude to other philosophers, and especially to criticism: one can scarcely find a book or paper attacking Lewis’ views that doesn’t contain an acknowledgement to him for his help. What mattered to him – what he loved – were the ideas, the arguments, the philosophy, not winning or being right. He was the ideal, the model philosopher; he’s also (and this is a very different matter) widely regarded as being the best philosopher of his generation – perhaps of the twentieth century. (Emphasis added.)
The model philosopher indeed.
There’s been a lot of hubbub, both here and elsewhere in the blogworld, about the Becker-Posner blog. But if it’s intellectual firepower in a group blog you’re after, you should be reading Left2Right. Here’s its mission statement, which should be good for setting off a round of debates.
In the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, many of us have come to believe that the Left must learn how to speak more effectively to ears attuned to the Right. How can we better express our values? Can we learn from conservative critiques of those values? Are there conservative values that we should be more forthright about sharing? “Left2Right” will be a discussion of these and related questions.
Although we have chosen the subtitle “How can the Left get through to the Right?”, our view is that the way to get through to people is to listen to them and be willing to learn from them. Many of us identify ourselves with the Left, but others are moderates or independents. What we share is an interest in exploring how American political discourse can get beyond the usual talking points.
The contributors so far include Elizabeth Anderson, Kwame Appiah, Josh Cohen, Stephen Darwall, Gerald Dworkin, David Estlund, Don Herzog, Jeff McMahan, Seana Shiffrin, and David Velleman. Wowsa. And many other names you may have heard of, from Peter Railton to Richard Rorty, are listed as being part of the team. This should be worth following.
It’s a commonly heard complaint that philosophy and philosophers are too divorced from the real world and practical considerations. I always thought this kind of concern was overblown, but nevertheless I’m glad to see philosophy brought into contact with the real world in new and interesting ways. As in this Friday’s Philosophy and Wine conference at the University of London. The philosophers who are speaking are quite distinguished – Roger Scruton, Kent Bach and Barry Smith – and there is a wine tasting as part of the conference, so it looks like it should be a lot of fun. Any readers in London with a spare Friday and an interest in, er, philosophy of wine should pop along.
Kai von Fintel links to one of the newest (and coolest) toys in the toolbox.
Google Scholar
It returns academic papers matching a search phrase you look for, ranked by number of citations. Hours and hours of fun to be had!
Barring a Red Sox sized miracle comeback, Kerry will win this one. Red Sox sized miracles happen (just ask the Red Sox!) but it’ll be tough for Bush. Even if Kerry gets to 270 projected electoral votes (if he does), there’ll still be something to watch tonight though. I’m going to pay particular attention to whether he reaches two particular numbers – 297 and 317. The significance of 297 is that once he’s there, two state’s results will have to be overturned to make it a Bush victory. The significance of 317 is that once he’s there, three state’s results will have to be overturned to make it a Bush victory. At that point we can put away the lawyers, because there aren’t going to be three results overturned.
My credence that he’ll get to 317 is around 20%. He’d have to hold Ohio and Florida and pull off an upset somewhere – Colorado, North Carolina or Virginia seeming to be the main targets. It’s hard to make intuitive judgments about disjunctions like this one because obviously Kerry is behind the 8-ball in every one of those states. But I give some credence to the possibility he can pull off one of them. If not, Court TV might be in for a ratings bonanza.
By the way, the Rep_L52 contract at Iowa is seriously underpriced. Nobody is exit polling Texas, and if Bush is running up the score there as much as Zogby is saying, he’s got way more than a 20% shot at the popular vote.
This one might be rational. As of this instant (4.16 et) Tradesports has Kerry slightly ahead of Bush. I think he should be much further ahead – at this stage he only needs one of Ohio and Florida to win and he’s a slight favourite in both. But it’s another data point.
UPDATE: As Daniel says in comments, both Tradesports and IEM can’t handle the server load today. Post any updated numbers from either site in comments here – if you can get through to those sites.
I’ve been thinking today about what the biggest surprises (other than the absence of even bigger surprises) about the campaign have been. I agree with Big Media Matt that the it’s surprising the Republicans didn’t go after Kerry’s Senate vote against the first gulf war. I think it’s surprising that the Kerry campaign didn’t make more of his great successes as a Senator, e.g. BCCI, Iran-Contra, POW investigation etc, especially since every one of them tells against the narrative of Kerry as someone who takes the soft option.
Also on the list should be how much the anthrax attacks completely disappeared from the public consciousness. For a gratuitously extreme example, here’s Cliff May
It’s 3 PM on November 2, 2004. There has not been a terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11/01.
Were the anthrax attacks not terrorism, not on American soil, or not after September 11 2001? Either of the three options boggles the mind, but presumably May believes one of the disjuncts is true.
It’s nice to see which bloggers think the most important moment in the election campaign was centred around them. It reminds me of how I answer when someone asks me what the most important events in recent philosophy have been. (Well, there was this conference on the west coast I was at, and this long lunch with a few friends where we solved a bunch of problems and…)
More seriously, America’s Greatest Columnist turns in a blinder on the joy of voting.