Tradition
American
American philosophy covers thinkers chiefly from the United States, from the pragmatists to writers on race, science, technology and care.
On this site it runs from Frederick Douglass's appeal to natural rights against slavery and the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey, to W. E. B. Du Bois on double consciousness and Aldo Leopold's land ethic. Later figures include Thomas Kuhn on scientific revolutions, Carol Gilligan on care, Stanley Cavell, and scientists and theorists of information and technology such as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener and Langdon Winner. Many American philosophers are filed instead under Analytic. It answers questions on truth, meaning, science, race, technology and how to live.
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Was plate tectonics a Kuhnian revolution? Geology as a test case
In discussions of Kuhn, the examples are nearly always from physics and astronomy. I wanted to test his picture on an earth-science revolution I know something about. Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in the 1910s. He had real evidence: the fit of…
Started by Anand KurupReply first (no replies yet) -
Moral dumbfounding at a debate tournament: Haidt’s elephant and its rider
Most weekends I watch teenagers at debate tournaments decide what they believe in the first ten seconds and then spend forty minutes building reasons for it. Jonathan Haidt would not be surprised. His social intuitionist model, first set out in "The Emotional…
Started by Sam ElleryReply first (no replies yet) -
Legal realism is not a claim about what exists, and lawyers should stop treating it as one
A small irritation from evenings spent arguing with lawyer friends in Lahore. They say "I'm a legal realist" to mean one of three things: that judges decide on their prejudices and then find reasons; that law is ultimately power; or that there…
Started by Hamza QureshiReply first (no replies yet) -
Our neighborhood grant asked us to prove a mural was ‘art’, not ‘signage’
This spring our block association on the South Side applied for a small public-art grant to paint a mural on the side of a corner store. The design came from kids at the rec center and includes the store's name and the…
Started by Dana WhitfieldReply first (no replies yet) -
Rousseau said the English were free only at election time. Was he right about the rest of us?
In Book III of The Social Contract, Rousseau has a line that hit me hard: the English people think they are free, but they are badly mistaken; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament, and once those are…
Started by Dana WhitfieldReply first (no replies yet) -
I use modal logic at work every day, and the engineers around me have no idea it was philosophy
Every day, the engineers I work with write properties like "on every path, whenever a request is issued, a grant eventually follows". In our notation that's something like AG(request → AF grant): A for "on all paths", G for "always", F for…
Started by Derek HollisReply first (no replies yet)