A few days ago, over at my other blog, I published an article that I touted on my social media as “the last piece on free will you will ever need to read.” That was a slight exaggeration, but only… Read More ›
Metaphilosophy
The nature of philosophy: Scruton vs Williamson edition
As some readers may recall, last year I published serially a whole book on this blog on the nature of philosophy (available here as a single volume). This sort of thing is an exercise in meta-philosophy, i.e., philosophizing about the… Read More ›
Can we compare different cultural forms of life?
“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 ›
The never ending discussion: what’s philosophy good for?
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 ›
The Nature of Philosophy video series
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 ›
Has philosophy lost its way?
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 ›
Pseudoscience and Continental Philosophy
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 ›
