As the Worm Turns

Earlier I mentioned the importance of distinguishing between relativism and pluralism without ever getting around to defining pluralism; an oversight due to laziness on my part.
Luckily, a recent skerfuffle between Damon Linker and Matthew Yglesias over the late Richard Rorty can act as a nice little primer on pluralism and its grounds. Linker claims that […]

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Richard Rorty has died.
Like many philosophers, I moved from reading cheap Penguin editions of Plato to reading Rorty — primarily because Rorty was much easier than reading Heidegger. While I eventually came to disagree with his positions he was still a huge formative influence. I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing had I not […]

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This is just a brief follow-up on my earlier post on relativism and post-modernism. While the connection was in the back of my mind I failed to make it explicit.
The kind of relativism that leads to paradigmatic crank/absolutist argumentation — the kind of argumentation where the goal is to defeat the opponent rather than convince […]

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I’m going to “borrow” a post on the Florida Student Philosophy Blog because it illustrates my essential point about the relationship between reason and religious faith. (I will leave my relationship to the original posting intentionally vague, although the clever will be able to suss it out.)
Joe Long, an FSU Philosophy grad student, critiques Sam […]

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The problem of Free Will isn’t really my bag, even though the Florida State University philosophy program is highly ranked in the area. But I do know one thing: the existence of free will doesn’t entail the falsity of materialism. So when we find evidence that even lowly insects show signs of free will, this […]

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