Much of what we hear, and which sets the terms for the debates that matter to us, comes from a few select voices. News channels, opinion columnists, prolific and well-followed social media commentators — these are the voices which dominate.
There’s an obvious problem with this: the loudest voices, plausibly…
Here’s an indecent proposal for you. (Imagine) you live in a fairly decent but expensive place, and you work a white-colour job (broadly construed: one you can do online). …
People today are interested in ideology. What exactly ideology means is a bit unclear, but I’ll understand it as a set of background beliefs imposed upon us (not necessarily arrived at ourselves), debatable, and action- and belief- shaping.
Imposed upon us: they’re not things that we reason to (the way…
According to his wife, John von Neumann, talking about his work on the atom bomb, said:
What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left, yet it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for…
Philosophy is concerned with the big questions. Do humans have free will? What are numbers? How does thought connect to reality? Can grounding help modal process reliabilism capture JTB’’** analyses of knowledge?
I made that one up, although it’s more likely to be form of the sort of question you’re…
What’s the point of conversation? I don’t pose this in a misanthropic, #introvertproblems sort of way, but as a question that’s been of interest to philosophers and linguists of all sorts for a decent amount of time. Here, I want to explore one famous framework for thinking about it, present…
A neat family of arguments that are quite popular at the moment are debunking arguments (I talked about them a couple of posts ago and references are there). A debunking argument takes beliefs we assume to be justified and shows how they are in fact the products of non-truth-tracking factors…
TLDR: A lot of philosophy aims, by looking at how we represent the world, to say things about the world. Analytic philosophy is a species of philosophy in part defined historically by its being a reaction to Hegel. …
A range of interesting arguments in philosophy are debunking arguments. Such arguments attempt to cause us to question our faith in what we believe or take ourselves to know by pointing out that our beliefs are the outcomes of processes that might not be truth-tracking. A paradigm such argument might…
Here’s a puzzle. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is a disgusting dark body-comedy, covering — and this is non-exhaustive — sexual abuse, murder, drug addiction, serious injury, disease and much more. Little Britain is a British kinda disgusting body (kinda) comedy, which sought to make humour from disabled, poor, and…
Matthew McKeever
Novella "Coming From Nothing" at @zer0books (bitly.com/cfnextract). Academic philosophy at: http://mipmckeever.weebly.com/
