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Lately I've been finding things in books
In a copy of Hugo Bedeau's Thinking and Writing about Philosophy there is a boarding pass and motel receipt from July 2004. (The receipt is in someone else's name.) In The Four Loves, there's a script for my high school drama performance of the opening song from Beauty and the Beast (1994 or 1995). In The Things They Carried (college bookstore ( Read more... ) -
Me, You, and Everything We Mean
In the opening paragraph of “Self-Reliance,” Emerson writes,
“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, - and our first thought is rendered back to us ( Read more... ) -
Know-How, Modes of Presentation, and Maps
One dimension of know-how is that it is a distinct mode of presentation of something-a method for doing something told to you or demonstrated to you or written down. These are ways of conveying the same information-a method or a technique for doing something. Part of the reason that know-how does not or would not amount to know-that is that this ( Read more... ) -
It is a tenet held in common
both by my undergraduate college and by some Wittgensteinians I have known that you can't address philosophical questions directly. You can only (a) ask what so and so means by x (for St. John's and people in that, largely Catholic and/or Straussian history of philosophy tradition), or you can (b) tell people their words don't mean what they think ( Read more... ) -
Believing in Yourself
Kestra is about to run her first marathon. Kestra has never run a marathon before-it is something she wants to try. The night before, she gets cold feet, wondering if she will be able to finish it. Kestra’s friend tells her to believe in herself. Kestra summons this belief and shows up the next day to run ( Read more... ) -
Ghosts
Earlier today I was looking out the window in my office. I could see a big university parking lot and a residential street on the other side. And suddenly it was as if my whole frame of mind from early at IU crept into the frame--like an orange-tinged overlay. And I was looking at the scene but also looking at the whole mindset I had then, the ( Read more... ) -
The Scope of the Self-Blindness Thought Experiment
Shoemaker claims that someone cannot be ‘self-blind’, or unable to become aware of her mental states through their self-intimation. He makes this claim first for beliefs, desires, and intentions, and later extends it to sensations. Here are Shoemaker’s two statements of the self-blindness thought experiment.
A self-blind creature would be one w ( Read more... ) -
Meaning and Identity
[This is something I wrote for my students for the last week of our Intro. to Philosophy course on knowledge, meaning and the meaning of life ( Read more... ) -
Fake Barns and Self-Knowledge
You’re driving through an area in New England with a large number of fake barns in it. They’re just façades made to look like barns, for no reason anyone but the creators can fathom. Some farmers got together and thought this would be a fun trick, or maybe they were ordered by the local tourist board to make the countryside look more quaint and ( Read more... ) -
The Epistemic Injustice of Gaslighting
“I am not to give myself explanations that divide me from myself, that take sides against myself, that would exact my consent, not attract it. That would cede my voice to isolation. Then I might never be found” (Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 100).
Little has been written about the effect being the victim of gaslighting has on someone ( Read more... )