David Auerbach
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Posts Tagged "philosophy"
Check out all of the posts tagged with "philosophy".
More Carnap and Some Raymond Smullyan
Rudolf Carnap, what a card. Eric Schliesser sums it up with a reference to Carnap’s infamous “The Elimination of Metaphysics“: In the history of philosophy, “the nothing itself nothings,” has, of course, a dubious status as ...
Alasdair MacIntyre on Freud: A More-than-Scientific Unification of Concepts
As a follow-up to Ernest Gellner’s attack on psychoanalysis, here is Alasdair MacIntyre with a more charitable critique of Freud. Up until the time of After Virtue (still a fascinating book), MacIntyre was a fairly keen observer ...
Uncharitability
On the topic of uncharitability, here’s a pretty good example from mythology expert G.S. Kirk: If I am right, then, the belief in mythical thinking directed to visual and figurative objects is a hangover from the ...
Ernest Gellner on Words and Things: Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language
Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things was Gellner’s scathing attack on ordinary language philosophy. It caused a fuss in 1959 and made Gellner’s name after Gilbert Ryle refused to review it and Bertrand Russell angrily defended ...
By the Most Violent and Absurd Reasoning
I have long entertained a suspicion with regard to the decisions of philosophers upon all subjects, and found in myself a greater inclination to dispute than assent to their conclusions. There is one mistake to ...
Galen Strawson, Buddhist Philosophy, and Radical Self-Awareness
The recent intersection of analytic philosophy and philosophical Buddhism has been a very heartening sign for me. Not only does it move the discussion away from what I’ve always felt to be the dead-end of ...
Nagarjuna’s List of 119 Auspicious Mental Events
This list is given as part of a posited rebuttal to Nagarjuna’s position that mental events are without substance, part of the general theory of emptiness that is part of the Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy. People ...