Philosophy Now Forum

Welcome, and congratulations on getting into philosophy while still at school. I did too, and am still at it 40 years later.

Thanks for the link, Phillip. The film is both very interesting, and very well put together. It was also fun to see Rush Limbaugh making a complete idiot of himself because he hadn't bothered to check the facts - my sympathies to Erin McKenna. So the central question is, have American history and ge...

Eliza wrote:Since it has been a while, though a re-introduction would probably be nice.

Welcome back! Fear not, philosophy has not disappeared in the interim.

The paper sent to Sokal did not advance a thesis. It rehashed the more supposedly egregious claims about Quantim theory by continental philosophers and then added his own innaccuracies about Quantum theory and then when they published it because they wanted the view of a scientist they said Got Yah...

Rortabend wrote:Your hasty dismissal of the hermeneutics of quantum gravity disappoints me.

Alas, I do not feel its pull.

Sure that proves all continental theory is bunk. I did not make that claim. I only claim that some of it is bunk. But Lacan is in that class. Try re-wording some of his claims, or explaining their content. The re-wording or explanation must be faithful to the original: it would be cheating to subst...

Could the division be overcome simply by asserting that Lacan is wrong in claiming that the Symbolic is masculine in spite of the seeming historical validity of that assertion? Lacan's claim, as stated here (and very likely as stated in the original), is a vacuous claim by a vacuous author. I sugge...

Hello Kayla Philosophy and computer science sounds like a perfectly good combination. If you decide to work in philosophy after your course, the computer science will be very useful in studying the philosophy of mind. (Some philosophers think that the mind and computers don't have much to do with ea...

I notice its you then Rick then Anja Steinbauer(his missus?) on the Mary Ward lectures. Is there an entrance fee? The Saturday afternoon debates are completely free. There is no need to book, just turn up. (In fact, there is no way to book.) They are not debates with one or two people on each side,...

Hello Digitig

There is still plenty of other philosophical activity in London, for example Philosophy for All ( http://www.pfalondon.org/ ).

There is ongoing argument about whether we should interpret Kant's philosophy as involving one world (in two aspects, phenomenal and noumenal) or as involving two worlds. Really? Doesn't he clearly state he means the phenomenon to be a perceivable expression of the noumenon? One place to find a sum...

Definitely the latter. Talk of the noumenal world is a way of setting limits to our knowledge. We have the general notion of a way the world really is, independently of our apprehension of it, but we cannot have any definite grasp of the world as it really is. There is ongoing argument about whether...

a way of inviting somebody out which they couldn't refuse without falling into logical inconsistency. But once he or she has fallen into inconsistency, he or she can prove anything, including (1) that it is acceptable to fall into inconsistency, and (2) that it would be much more fun to stay in and...

I could not get the link to work, but the ISBN in the link appears to be for a reprint of the Jowett translation. If that is so, I can understand your difficulty. That translation is from the nineteenth century. There are plenty of more modern translations available. I would suggest going into a boo...

Besides his own writings, Balfour has the distinction of having featured in a Gettier case that Russell noted, avant la lettre. A man had the justified true belief that in 1906, the Prime Minster's name began with a B. But the man thought that Balfour was still PM in 1906, when in fact he had been s...