“…it was David Hume who first woke me from my dogmatic slumber.”

21Aug10

Philosophy is becoming natural again; or perhaps it is that science is turning philosophical.  But whether you call them experimental philosophers or philosophical experimenters, they promise to cut through the knotty problems of traditional philosophy.  Free will (Libet), meta-ethics (Greene), consciousness (Dennett): questions that philosophers have wrangled over for centuries now have been reduced to reaction times and blood-oxygen levels and in the process, it seems, solved.  Leibniz is out, fMRI is in; industrialization has come to philosophy at last.

If that is so, I will play the role of Luddite.  The optimism driving this movement forward obscures the problems with the new methodology and confirms the value of the old analytical approach.  There are questions, both local (How should neuroscientific claims be interpreted?  What if empiricism shows the existence of innate categories?  What does it mean if we find the source of a certain kind of belief?)  and global (What is the aim of science?  What is empiricism?  Is everything an error theory?  Is empiricism/naturalism self-refuting?  What is rationality for embodied, evolved animals?).  Having raised these questions, I will discuss various formulations of the problems and various attempts at solutions.  In the process I will focus on thinkers who have been to post-Kantian philosophy what Hume was to Kant:  the nightmare that startles us into consciousness.

Future topics may include:

- Charles Sanders Peirce: chance/indeterminacy/evolution/laws; community; the motivation and origin of logic; defeasible reasoning; induction; pragmati(ci)sm; science; probability; criticism of Cartesian thought; 1st/2nd/3rd-ness; signs; reasoning; differences between math and philosophy.

-Life of Peirce

-philosophical significance of Darwinism

-Bas van Fraassen:  voluntarism, stances, religious belief, empiricism, Pascal’s Wager, rationality (obligatory vs. permissible), experience, history of philosophy; constructive empiricism; experience; responses to critics; scientific revolutions; explanation

-criticism of fMRI methodology

- relevance of the origin/motivation of beliefs; applications to morality

-undercutting defeaters

-Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism

-criticism of use of neuroscience in arguments for atheism

-laws of nature

-induction

-functions of philosophy

I will attempt to post every day.

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