Author: Huenemann

Richard Kraut was a teacher of mine in grad school. He’s a very thoughtful, generous philosopher with views well worth hearing. There is an interview with him at 3:AM here, and it covers his views of ancient philosophy and the relevance of history generally to contemporary philosophy, as well as his views of contemporary moral theory. An excerpt:

[T]he conception of well-being that I favour is not a philosophical invention alien to common ways of thought – something that a philosopher dreamt up out of the blue. It is part of our conceptual framework that infants and children are beings that need to grow, and that this process is good for them. There are wonderful things that we experience in childhood, but Peter Pan to the contrary, refusing to grow up is not healthy.

Other theories of well-being simply overlook this aspect of our common normative framework. Rawls, for example, as I’ve noted, focuses on rational planning: what is good for us is to achieve the plan that we would adopt with full deliberative rationality. But infants and small children are not yet able to engage in the sophisticated intellectual activity we call planning. They can’t look for reasons to pursue this end rather than that. Yet it is undeniable that much that they do is good for them, much that they do is bad for them, and much that willy-nilly happens to them is good or bad for them. It can’t be the case that we have two different concepts of what is good for a human being – one of which is applicable to infants and small children, and the other of whic is applicable to later stages of life.

Of course, the things that are good for small children are different from the things that are good for adults. But there is only one relation here: the relation of being good for someone. I think that one point in favor of the developmental conception of well-being that I derive from Aristotle is that it recognises this unity.

The University of Utah is hosting this year’s Intermountain Philosophy Conference this Friday. Here is the website with the schedule and other details. If you are interested and want a ride, or can offer one, post a comment saying as much, and we’ll see what order spontaneously develops through the flow of information!

He sighed, finally understanding why some artists stopped painting, why explorers stopped exploring and why Guns N’ Roses should’ve only released one album. He knew he existed, not just because he’d spent years of his life proving it, but because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t feel the crushing weight of everyone’s expectations pressing down on his slender shoulders.

He twirled the end of his goatee, staring blankly at the wall, until his thoughts were interrupted by a text message. It was a picture of Galileo, holding up the “Father of Modern Science” mug Descartes had sent. “Thanks bro. — GG,” he’d typed.

Read the rest here.

(Thanks to M. Fuelling)

Here is an interesting article by Massimo Pigliucci on several questions relating to the unification of knowledge. I find it sensible, though it’s written from a naturalistic perspective, so of course I would. The conclusion:

This isn’t a suggestion to give up, much less a mystical injunction to go ‘beyond science’. There is nothing beyond science. But there is important stuff before it: there are human emotions, expressed by literature, music and the visual arts; there is culture; there is history. The best understanding of the whole shebang that humanity can hope for will involve a continuous dialogue between all our various disciplines. This is a more humble take on human knowledge than the quest for consilience, but it is one that, ironically, is more in synch with what the natural sciences tell us about being human.