All topics
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Reading group: Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, over four weeks
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is the essay where the phrase "the myth of the given" comes from. It is famous, hard and shorter than its reputation. I would like to read it slowly with whoever is willing. Text. The Harvard…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Reading group: Sen’s ‘Rational Fools’ and the problem of commitment
Amartya Sen's essay "Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory" appeared in Philosophy & Public Affairs in 1977 and is reprinted in his Choice, Welfare and Measurement. It's about thirty pages and it has been rattling around my…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies -
Reading group: David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), chapters 1–4
Most people meet modal realism as a punchline: the man who believed every possible world is as real as ours. I want to read the book properly, because the argument is far better than its reputation, and because I think most of…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Reading group: Pascal’s wager fragment and the pages around it, in French and English
I translate for a living, and Pascal is one of the writers whose sentences I envy most. The wager is usually taught as a three-line argument in a table. In the Pensées it is a long, broken, urgent fragment, and the context…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Reading group: Tarski’s “The Semantic Conception of Truth” (1944) in three sittings
Tarski's technical work on truth is hard going, but in 1944 he wrote a non-technical paper for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that explains the ideas for philosophers. It is clear, polemical in places, and only thirty-odd pages. I propose we read it…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Reading group: Quine’s ‘On What There Is’, slowly, in three sittings
"On What There Is" first appeared in the Review of Metaphysics in 1948 and opens From a Logical Point of View (1953). It is short, funny in places, and much quoted by people who have not read it. I propose we read…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak6 replies -
Reading group: Stoic logic in Diogenes Laertius, Lives Book VII
Chrysippus is said to have written hundreds of books, a large share of them on logic, and almost all are lost. What we have of Stoic logic comes mostly through later writers: Diogenes Laertius, who gives a summary of Stoic dialectic in…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
Reading group: Nagel’s bat, Chalmers’s hard problem and Dennett’s case against qualia
I write formal-verification tools for a living, and I like threads where the argument can be pinned down. Consciousness is the place where that's hardest, so let's read three short classics together, in the order that shows the debate developing. Week 1.…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies