-
Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and why it still matters
Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and why it still matters (Random House, 2013) The overall purpose of the book is to describe the Enlightenment as an intellectual phenomenon, a matter of ideas being thought and books being written, published, and read. There is little attention paid to what we might call the material conditions of history… Continue reading
-
More musings on Humean causality
We expect that causal laws will be the same across all experience. Hume famously claims that this expectation is grounded neither in pure reason nor in experience. Not pure reason: for one can posit a cause and deny the effect without being contradictory. And not in experience: for all experience can ever show is what… Continue reading
-
Israel, A Revolution of the Mind
Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind (Princeton UP, 2010). This book is based on lectures Israel gave at Oxford in 2008 in honor of Isaiah Berlin. The overall aim is to show how modern democracy emerged from the tension between Moderate Enlightenment and Radical Enlightenment. The chief maxim of Radical Enlightenment is “that all… Continue reading
-
Reflections on academic administration
I’m just ending my second foray into academic administration. The first one was serving as department head over a department including philosophy, communications studies, and all of our foreign language programs. It was a terrific exercise in mental and emotional flexibility – at one point I was adjudicating a dispute between a faculty member and a staff assistant… Continue reading
-
Hume and the expedition to Canada
In 1746, Hume returned to London after touring Europe as tutor and caretaker of the mad Marquess of Annendale. He was not sure what was next in his life. He was already 35 and somewhat ashamed of not having yet made a career for himself. He resolved to return to Scotland, but at the last… Continue reading
-
Hume falls into a bog, promises his way out
At the beginning of book three of his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume argues that justice is something we invent. In a word, justice is unnatural. It isn’t something we just see in the world, since we only ever see what is, and nothing in what we see tells us how things ought to… Continue reading
-
Review of Phillipson’s Hume
Review of Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). Many people know of David Hume the great empiricist, the skeptic of causality, and the architect of a moral system based on natural sentiments. But in his own day, Hume was most famous as an historian and political analyst. This book helps us by… Continue reading
-
My six recommendations for what academics in the humanities can do to help save the humanities
An idle self-scolding: 1. Everyone – not all the time, but every once in a while, acknowledge the fact that human beings occasionally produce something noble, beautiful, or virtuous without oppressing anyone. Writing like Eeyore is not doing us any favors. 2. English faculty – it’s okay to get excited once in a while about… Continue reading
-
Scholarship vs. Research vs. Push-ups
When I started as an Assistant Professor, people started calling my kind of academic reading and writing “RESEARCH”, and they encouraged me to do the same. At least, this is how I remember it. It seemed to me strange and awkward, because in my mind “RESEARCH” required surveys at the very minimum, and perhaps also… Continue reading
-
“The Metaphysician and the Hole in the Ground”
“In his middle to late thirties (over the years 1679-85), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent more than three years in his visits to a silver mining region in the Harz mountains. He believed he could devise new and more efficient ways of pumping water out of the deep shafts, enabling miners to dig even deeper and… Continue reading
-
Sea battles, beasties in the blood, and the summer of 1665
In the summer and autumn of 1665, a German expatriate in London exchanged a series of fascinating letters with a renegade Dutch Jew. The expatriate was Henry Oldenburg, who was serving as secretary of the newly-formed Royal Society of London. The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge – which, if formed… Continue reading
-
Nicomachus, Introduction to Arithmetic
Nicomachus’s Introduction to Arithmetic is not merely about numbers. It is a treatise aimed at providing a mathematical metaphysics for all entities of any quantity or size whatsoever. It is said that Plato had a sign above the entryway to his academy: “Let no one enter who is ignorant of mathematics”. Nicomachus (c. 60-120 c.e.)… Continue reading
-
Hume and causality
(Note: I’ve decided to start posting some lectures I’ve written out, under the new category “from the old yellowed notes”.) We can examine our lives from the inside or from the outside. From the inside we jump from thought to thought, from sensation to sensation, with memories mixing in with new ideas, interrupted by our… Continue reading
-
Ah, libraries.
“Sit in your local coffee shop and your laptop can tell you a lot, especially if you wield your search terms adeptly. But if you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will still have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stone stairs. There – as in great libraries… Continue reading
-
My training to take over the world
I am a great believer in technology’s capacity to build our native skills, and so lately I have been augmenting my talents for world domination through playing Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. (For some reason, Sid Meier thinks it’s important that Sid Meier’s Civilization IV be known as “Sid Meier’s Civilization IV,” but I’m not typing… Continue reading
-
How the internet, and computers generally, impart education
Answer: by not working very well. I’ll explain. My son spends a lot of time playing Minecraft. It’s a brilliant game that operates in two modes: creative mode, in which you can build all sorts of structures and even simple circuits my collecting raw materials and re-shaping them; and play mode, in which you and… Continue reading
-
Philosophical progress?
David Chalmers recently addressed the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge, and he jokingly announced at the beginning that everything he was about to say was not to leave the room. Of course, there are links to the talk everywhere now, and here is another one. His joke makes sense as a joke because of the… Continue reading
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Huenemanniac 