by Daniel A. Kaufman I want to talk about a certain metaphor in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It appears in a lone sentence in Book III, Ch. 3., and while mentioned only briefly, it is significant, not just in understanding the Ethics, but in grasping a crucial point about the limits of reason and deliberation more generally. [T]he end cannot be […]
By Margaret Rowley On the back of our house is a porch, probably ten feet long and five feet wide, hung all around with plants, mostly herbs, the product of my cyclical summertime desire to dig in the dirt. The twine hanging them from the ceiling creaks in the wind. The porch is surrounded by old-growth trees, marking a neighborhood […]
by E. John Winner Philosophical background This is not a text of philosophy, but it would be remiss not to note some of the philosophical background to the issues raised. One of the problems with that background is that in the kind of discussion we’ll be having here, we will naturally be making claims regarding fictional characters, which some philosophers […]
by Mark English Questions of geopolitics are all too easy to talk about, but very difficult to talk about sensibly. In this respect they are not unlike a lot of other “big questions” that take us beyond the limits of the relatively small and circumscribed worlds in which our distant ancestors struggled for survival and within which our brains and […]
By Daniel A. Kaufman Over at the Daily Nous, a much read, insider philosophy blog, David Velleman, one of today’s top philosophers, who enjoys digs in the world’s #1 ranked philosophy department, posted his version of a Modest Proposal: philosophy journals should no longer publish papers written by graduate students, and tenure and promotion committees should stop counting papers produced […]
by Lillie Sauer What is inspiration? I’ve never really questioned it until recently. It’s usually portrayed as the illumination of a mental light bulb or some similarly sudden “Aha!” moment. Maybe sometimes it is a lot like that for some people. Still, there are those of us who don’t often feel like we have the mental wiring required to spark […]
by E. John Winner In the discussion following a recent essay by David Ottlinger, concerning the evolution of aesthetics in television, I commented that television as a medium has no aesthetic. That is all I wished to say on that matter. But I also said in passing that television viewers were rather doomed to discuss individual shows rather than the […]
by Mark English Different kinds of implicit or explicit claims about what exists are best understood, as I see it, in a piecemeal way, by looking at how words are used both in the context of specific disciplines and in ordinary communication. In various pieces published on this site, Daniel Kaufman has elaborated a somewhat different approach, drawing on a […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ More and more it seems to me that the way in which philosophy has gone the most wrong is in trying to assimilate human action with the motions of bodies, as understood in the natural sciences. This effort has made a mess of the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of action, as well as ethics, […]
by Dwayne Holmes Whatever I thought about Muhammad Ali, as a boxer, it all changed when I saw When We Were Kings. (1) For those who haven’t seen it, the movie documents a fight between Ali and George Foreman, which took place in Africa. It was a match I’d heard about, one that I knew Ali had won, but I […]
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