“Alternative and rival conceptions of rationality are at home in different conceptual schemes.” –Alasdair MacIntyre I’ve been reading and commenting on a book that has little to do with the range of subject matters usually covered here at Footnotes to… Read More ›
Seven years ago I officially began my career as a philosopher, being appointed as Chair of the Department of Philosophy at CUNY’s Lehman College. One of my first duties was to completely restructure the Department’s web site, which looked awful… Read More ›
As readers may remember, this past Spring we went through a long series of posts (27, to be exact) that presented in serialized form my book, The Nature of Philosophy: How Philosophy Makes Progress and Why It Matters. Over the past… Read More ›
One of the characteristics of philosophy as a field of inquiry is that — unique among human endeavors — it also inquiries upon itself. This was true since the times of Socrates and Epictetus, of course. Here is how the… Read More ›
Despite recent loud claims to the contrary, there is a significant difference between two modern styles of doing philosophy: so-called analytic philosophy tends to be structured around rigorous arguments, is often dry, and concerns itself mostly (though not always) with… Read More ›
Philosophy is often accused of “not making progress,” a statement usually accompanied by an implied — and sometimes overt — sharp contrast with science, which obviously makes progress. In a forthcoming book for Chicago Press I suggest that it is actually significantly more difficult… Read More ›
