Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: W.V.O. Quine

  • A Pragmatic Option

    by Jay Jeffers ____ American Pragmatism has been controversial from the start. It was accused of “cosmic impiety” by Bertrand Russell, a founding father of Anglophone analytic philosophy. Rifts developed quickly even within the young school of thought, with the original pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce renaming his approach “pragmaticism,” which he thought was “ugly enough…

  • Wittgenstein and Woke Philosophy

    by Bharath Vallabha ___ Since I was a philosophy undergrad 25 years ago, I wanted academic philosophy to be more diverse. Back then, at least in the departments I was in, most philosophy professors and students were white males, and the curriculum was almost entirely European. What most bugged me was this was so taken…

  • In Defense of Philosophy: Analytic, Pragmatist, and Transcendental

    by Preston Stovall ____ [1] In a recent essay that got some attention in online circles in philosophy, Liam Kofi Bright foretold the end of analytic philosophy – characterizing it as a degenerating research program – and the exhaustion of a Kripkean understanding of what analytic philosophy has been up to. While reading Liam’s essay,…

  • Dialogues with Crispin on the Prolegomena: Vol. 3

    The third of my ongoing series of discussions with Crispin Sartwell on my Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics. https://youtu.be/Pmh39dGfgrM

  • Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics: Philosophy, Science, and “Common Sense”

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ As these prolegomena begin to wind down, I want to step back and speak a bit more generally about the conception of philosophy – and of inquiry more generally — from which they spring. Sellars, of course, in the opening paragraphs of “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” gave…

  • Discussions with Crispin on the Prolegomena: Vol. 1

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ The first of what will be several dialogues with Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson College) on my Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics. https://youtu.be/AVU-vDtJoIo

  • Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics: Ontological Commitment

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ My working idea in these prolegomena is that (a) philosophers feel forced to embrace various “desperate” positions (Panpsychism, Dualism, Illusionism, etc.), because of a number of (often venerated) assumptions that they’ve taken on board, all of which happen to be wrong, and (b) the re-examination of those assumptions, within the…

  • Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics: The Scientific and Manifest Images

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ I’ve characterized contemporary philosophy as beset by a number of “intellectually desperate” views that have come not just to mar the discipline but have led too many outstanding philosophers to waste their time and considerable talents. Of course, philosophy has always entertained views that when subjected to sober reflection and…