Applied Epistemology

Justin Smith has written an interesting essay on early modern ideas about human races. I found especially suggestive his observation that the decline of cataclysm-based theories about race was a key step toward replacing myth with history.

Sorry to post so infrequently. I've been busy -- on top of the usual holiday business -- with writing a quiz for O'Brien's Pub Quiz (delivered last week; it was very well received) and preparing to teach a course this Spring I've never taught before (on Asian religions [!]). In the course of catching-up on the wisdom of my ancestors, I found this gem from Taoist master Yufang Bizhui:

The NYT has a detailed piece on Antony Flew and the thoroughly suspect genesis of "his" book There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

As [Flew] himself conceded, he had not written his book.

“This is really Roy’s doing,” he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. “He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!”

One of my favorite philosophers alive today -- Ian Hacking -- has reviewed several books relating to the anti-Darwin crank-factory. Hacking notes that "creation science" reverses Edison's dictum: it is "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration".

Among the web letters, aside from

Slate has found out.

I have to say that I'm impressed at the amount of posthumous publicity Rorty has gotten. I suspect it's because he was really the only professional American philosopher who still tried to address the educated lay audience. (Also, I suspect he was the only philosopher whose ideas were intelligible to the humanities majors who go on to write for culture mags such as Slate.) With Rorty's passing, only philosophers such as Dan Dennett, Colin McGinn, Simon Blackburn, and Jerry Fodor are the tenuous threads between academic philosophy and the larger public sphere.

Probably not: Dick Rorty was only the most uninhibited analytic philosopher to embrace the anti-philosophical mood which has been growing in western civilization for the last 200 years. It's quite right to point out that he provoked disdain among most professors: I remember well the sour look pinching Marcia Homiak's face when I suggested choosing Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism as the reading for the philosophy majors' senior seminar.

UC Irvine is in a legal battle (sort of) with the widow of Mr. Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida. The source of the conflict, goofily enough, stems from a student-banging vampire expert. In my experience, professors who teach courses on vampires are kooks.

A generally well-done philosophy quiz.

Brian tipped me to this DVD, which, um, fills me with horror. When videos or books purport to "make philosophy easy", they almost always bungle it. Austin and Wittgenstein would have had contempt for Lyotard. (John Searle tells the story of Austin pointing one of his long fingers at the French existentialist Merleau-Ponty at a conference, and saying "his work leads to nothing, but they revere him as a little tin god." And Lyotard : Merleau-Ponty :: Jeff Garcia : Steve Young.) And Wittgenstein was always, even in his later work, an ascetic modernist -- if Weimar Vienna revolted him enough to head for peasant huts, 1970's Parisian intellectual culture would have made him retch.

Blackwell continues to realize that even the smallest vein of pop culture vastly outsells anything in academic philosophy:

Blackwell Publishing Call for Abstracts
Batman and Philosophy

Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial but accessible, written to engage the intelligent lay reader. Contributors of accepted essays will receive an honorarium.

Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following: