Over at the NPR group blog, Stuart Kauffman has an excellent response to Stephen Jay Gould’s argument that there are two non-overlapping magesteria–science and religion. Kauffman’s critique of natural law as a sufficient basis for understanding evolution argument Meillassoux’s argument concerning necessity. As Meillassoux argues that regularities bring about necessity Read more…
I’d like to add my favorite underappreciated philosopher to the list (as has been done here and here): Seneca. Seneca’s very underappreciation has become a source of his newly found appreciation (as was discussed in a Times Literary Supplement piece a few months back), and so maybe I’ll soon be Read more…
God did not create the universe, says Hawking – Yahoo! News. Hawking also sounds like Spinoza when he claims: “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”
There are many Humes out there. There is Hume the epistemologist, or more exactly the epistemologist, according to many in the analytic tradition, whose project failed because he lacked the philosophical resources of the twentieth century—namely, either a Fregean or (late) Wittgensteinian theory of meaning and language. There is Hume Read more…
The path that led James to radical empiricism was neither easy nor straightforward. Its motivation was straightforward enough: Hume failed to account for conjunctive relations and overly stressed disjunctive relations. If a cause and an effect can be experienced as two separate, disjoint entities, then the problem for Hume is Read more…
In a great op-ed, David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan, lays the current economic crisis at the hands of Reagan. He’s far from the first to do so, but coming from a high-profile former Reagan insider it is damning. This almost reads as Read more…
Having just finished reading Greg Shirley’s recently published book, Heidegger and Logic, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts before they disappear into the fog as I read the next book, and the next one after that. There are numerous strengths in this book. There are the obvious, headline Read more…
With a deadline for an essay on Deleuze and sex looming I can’t help but read a double entendre into my title. In working toward an understanding of the third kind of knowledge for Spinoza, I need first to address the concept of conatus, which is integrally related to Spinoza’s Read more…
Steven Shaviro’s post lays out quite nicely the contrast, as he sees it, between Spinoza-Deleuze and Whitehead. In essence this boils down to what role, if any, the virtual plays in their work. As a longtime admirer of Whitehead’s work as well as Shaviro’s reading of Whitehead, I’d like to Read more…
In the context of Spinoza’s famous letter to Lodewijk Meyer (Letter 12) where Spinoza lays forth the differences, as he sees it, between the infinite and the finite, substance and modes, Spinoza makes an important distinction between eternity and duration: The difference between Eternity and Duration arises from this. For Read more…