by Daniel A. Kaufman __ Extensive reading and numerous discussions about the recent UK election and its significance for the United States, as well as an argument with my friend and colleague, Massimo Pigliucci, on Twitter has forced me to confront the fact that I am more politically homeless than I have ever been. (1) As the end of the […]
by Ronald Green The desire to know what will be, to rattle the cage of the future, of time itself, is close to being a human obsession. Of all the dimensions, it is time – a perpetually dangling bait – that we cannot do anything about. Stories of time travel are a manifestation of this frustration and the concomitant belief […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ The editors have invited us to “examine a single philosopher or school, maybe a movement,” so that we might “consider how what passed for wisdom then may or may not help us now.”† Undoubtedly, there are many areas in which we have surpassed the wisdom of our predecessors, but one in which we decidedly have […]
by Mark English The logical positivists took a very hard anti-metaphysical line. They were right, in my view, to see traditional metaphysics as being futile and pointless. The essential problem with metaphysics is epistemic. How (given a basically scientific view of the world) can purely metaphysical statements be justified? Rudolf Carnap and most of his Vienna Circle colleagues didn’t think […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ The end of the Fall semester is rapidly approaching, and it will mark the last time I will have taught the current iteration of my Philosophical Ideas in Literature course, devoted to five novels by Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962); The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965); Do Androids Dream […]
By Daniel A. Kaufman ___ The philosophical problem of consciousness is a problem concerning subjectivity. To be conscious is to be conscious of something: a color; a smell; a feeling or emotion; etc. This is why it is alternatively described as “conscious experience,” “self-consciousness,” etc. Consciousness, therefore, is a kind of point of view. Specifically, it is a first-person point […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ When I was in elementary school in the 1970’s, one way a kid might respond to an insult would be to say, “I know you are, but what am I?” The other kid would reply with another insult, to which the insulted would simply repeat the initial response. This would go on, with escalating annoyance […]
by Mark English If you grew up in London or New York or any other city with a strong literary and/or cinematic tradition or even in towns (such as many in Europe) with strong local traditions and customs, the geography of your childhood has an enhanced reality. I grew up in possibly the most isolated and culturally tenuous capital city […]
by E. John Winner ___ (1) Every field of human endeavor requires communication, and in communication, language generates ideas in the ordinary sense of that term (and sometimes in the technical philosophic senses of the term, as well). Since communication is a process, developing over time and in concrete contexts of social involvement, every idea has a history. Reviewing the […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ As readers of Course Notes will know, I created an entirely new Introduction to Philosophy course this year. Profound changes in the student population over the last several years, including an apparent inability to understand or even just read classics from the history of philosophy, as well as a troubling increase in the number of […]
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