Well, I made the stupid mistake of posting in real_philosophy and have once again been struck by the inability/unwillingness of certain people to engage in open discussion of certain points. It almost has me saying "fuck pluralism." Special thanks to those who have been arging alongside: apperception, phildow, and mendaciloquent. I even commend nanikore, a frequently maligned person (including by ( Read more... )

Last night I got so despondent about spending the evening reading that dissertation I ended up going out to buy a six-pack and rent Spiderman and Scotland, PA. The former movie because I haven't seen it and heard that it was pretty good, and the latter because I have wated to see it for a long time--it is an interpretation of MacBeth set in a ( Read more... )

I just completed what was, for me, a very liberating experience. As some of you may recall, I was a finalist for several national scholarships ranging from the Rhodes to the Mellon Fellowship for the Humanities. Well, I have a tendency to save e-mails of particular importance to myself at the time. Among them were various letters of condolences ( Read more... )

I have a few things to say about the death of Reagan (I must warn you that this is written mostly out of anger at not being able to mail things today ( Read more... )

Troubled by my inability to address such a canonical question as how brain chemistry relates to the lived body, I have had several mini-epiphanies as of the last few days. The first relates to my issues with language that I alluded to. By asking the mind-body question in terms of consciousness and physicalism, it becomes virtually impossible for ( Read more... )

I'm looking on-line to see if Dale Jacquette's textbook Symbolic Logic has gone into a new edition or not, so I decide to check Amazon. After all, they wouldn't sell dead stock. So I open the page, and I am not signed in, mind you, and down at the bottom it is offering the "buy it toghether" deal--nothing new here, right? Well, only if you ( Read more... )

noetickerf has asked me if I believe in some quality of the human being that cannot be explained by brain processes. The simple answer is "yes," but the more complicated answer is what exactly that could be? Well, I'm not sure I can furnish an answer to that. My difficulty in formulating a response, however, was largely derived from the lack of language ( Read more... )

*I arrived home safely on Wednesday evening after driving the 20-something hours from Memphis. Upon arrival, I checked my e-mail to discover that I had passed my comprehensive exam--only three more to go! Unless, of course, I decide to transfer ( Read more... )

So here is th comp. question supposedly testing my teaching knowledge of modern philosophy:

Descartes addresses the question of the subject's knowledge of extended substance in his well-known wax example. What is his argument, and what is his resultant position on the question? Choose one of the other Rationalists, sketch briefly his argument ( Read more... )

I flew back to Memphis yesterday to take my comprehensive exam tomorrow, and, once again, drama ensues.

The plan:Catch the RIPTA bus at 9:30am, ride to Kennedy Plaza and take the 11:20 Bonanza Bus to Logan International. Hop on my flight at 2:40, transfer in Atlanta and land in Memphis at 7pm. A friend of mine was supposed to then pick me up ( Read more... )