Author: Huenemann

Here is an interesting book review by Simon Blackburn of Alan Sokal’s latest book. Some years ago, Sokal, a physicist, submitted an essay on “the hermeneutics of quantum gravity” to a postmodernist journal and the essay was published. Then Sokal revealed that he made the whole thing up just by pasting together obscure phrases in vogue by postmodernists at the time. Har, har; everyone laughed at those silly postmodernists. But what is the moral of the story?

Here is a nice section from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy‘s entry on nothingness (written by Roy Sorenson). I think some of the thinking about emptiness has peculiar philosophical brilliance: the reasoning always seems “airtight,” so to speak, though we know something must have gone wrong somewhere.

Here is an interesting essay. An excerpt:

That compassion is natural to human beings there is no question. But does it pertain to our higher or to our lower natures? As even or precisely those who take compassion for a virtue acknowledge, it is an emotion. Can an emotion be a virtue? Yes, if the keynote of virtue is naturalness in the sense of spontaneity or authenticity. No, if what defines virtue is the perfection of our nature through the triumph of reason over passion. For this reason the long history of thought about compassion (stretching back at least 2,500 years now) has revolved around just this issue.

In a separate discussion, I came across this brilliant (if I say so myself) analogy for capturing various philosophers’ attitudes.

Here is the situation. You are in a crowded room, and you want to cross the room to get to the bar (for a ginger ale, of course). A philosopher is next to you. What advice does he give?

Socrates: “Obviously, nothing is more important than getting to the bar. Why do all these people seem to ignore what is most important? Let us berate them for their foolishness, and convince them that they should be moving toward the bar.”

Hegel: “The crowd is actually a line for the bar. Just be patient and stay in your place.”

Nietzsche: “Let’s creep along the wall, and fantasize about the one who will be able to leap over the crowd.”

Epictetus (the Stoic): “Don’t want to go to the bar. Want to stay where you are.”

Thoreau: “Let’s go out the window and go around.”

Christianity (according to Nietzsche): “Convince everyone that the bar is evil; that should clear the way for us!”

Buddha: “The bar is within you.”

Add more as you like!

Read this. It is by a guy who went to law school, graduated, and is now switching to something else. It contains this notable nugget:

It’s tempting to look back over part of one’s life and indulge in regret or self-praise when really, all the strands in the whole web of decisions that make up a life in progress are deeply and irreducibly entangled, and one can’t just chop one out without becoming a total counterfactual mess. (You may cite this as Gowder’s Holistic Argument for the Stupidity of Regret. Thank you.)

His blog looks interesting.