Another note on metaphysics and William Blake

Last time, I alluded, in a footnote, to an “elsewhere” wherein William Blake clarifies his mind/body dualism position.  I have since been cadged by the masses into both clarifying myself and citing my sources.  This quote comes from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate IV (which I linked to in my previous post, before […]

Happy William Blake Day (a week late or so)!

Alright, perhaps it is not yet an official holiday (is it?), but November 28th is in fact the anniversary of the death of this remarkable British poet-artist.  It has been far too long since I added a meaningful post here; I have been working on a number of new things which have simply not allowed […]

Hobbes and modern science v. Descartes (v. Rorty)

When I first read the opening from Hobbes’ Leviathan as an undergraduate, I laughed.  I laughed heartily.   There was something clearly, and quaintly, absurd about his simple (though perhaps vaguely Rube-Goldberg-esque) chain of mechanistic causal events which for him became the workings of the universe.  From Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 1: Of Sense: The cause […]

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Introduction

Having now crossed the introductory threshold into Rorty’s work, a few general notions have struck me.  The first is that it seems to me that Rorty, despite having a varied set of philosophical positions as a youth (assuming his autobiography is correct) and during his early philosophical career, held a remarkably stable philosophical position from […]

Ethics, situations, and the like

I’ve finished preparing my “summary” of Kwame Anthony Appiah‘s [amazonify]0674026098::text::::Experiments in Ethics[/amazonify].  I ended up deviating a bit too much to call my work a real summary, but I think many of the points will make for useful discussion.  A lot of material has been intentionally left out, particularly after the situational examples illustrated, because […]

Beginning work on ethics, psychology, and situations

I’ve begun constructing a brief summary of Kwame Anthony Appiah‘s [amazonify]0674026098::text::::Experiments in Ethics[/amazonify] for next week’s philosophy club meeting.  I intend to focus on three main concepts, beginning with the assumption of virtue ethics, moving through the challenges of situationist ethics, and ultimately applying a hybrid of those two concerns to the situations provided by […]