The Brains Blog

Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds: Conceptual Analysis and Conceptual Engineering

In the previous post, I defended a restricted form of modal skepticism and I concluded that many traditional philosophical issues could not be resolved and should be set aside. One may wonder what is left for philosophers to do: Am I suggesting to close philosophy departments? Fear not, dear reader, …

Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds: Modal Skepticism

Edouard Machery September 20, 2018 September 20, 2018 analytical philosophy / Causation / Concepts / Edouard Machery: Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds / Epistemology / Experimental Philosophy

In the previous post I presented the main arguments against the method of cases developed in Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds. Various objections can be raised against this argument, some of which have already been put in print. Chapter 5 addresses 8 objections: I defend the experimental quality of the research …

Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds: Unreliability, Dogmatism, and Parochialism

Edouard Machery September 19, 2018 September 19, 2018 analytical philosophy / Causation / Concepts / Edouard Machery: Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds / Epistemology / Experimental Philosophy

In the previous post, I argued for a minimalist characterization of the method of cases, which I share with some of the most well-known critics of experimental philosophy. In this post, I want to present the two arguments against the method of cases, developed in Chapter 3 and 4 of …

Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds: The Method of Cases

Edouard Machery September 18, 2018 September 18, 2018 analytical philosophy / Concepts / Edouard Machery: Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds / Experimental Philosophy

In the previous post, I introduced the method of cases: To find out whether modal claims are true, philosophers describe actual and possible situations and assess what facts hold in these situations. For instance, following Gettier’s classic paper, to determine whether, necessarily, someone knows that pif and only if she …

Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds: The Overall Argument

Edouard Machery September 17, 2018 September 17, 2018 analytical philosophy / Concepts / Edouard Machery: Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds / Epistemology / Experimental Philosophy / Free will / Metaphysics

Does responsibility require the possibility to have done otherwise? Does knowledge require safety? Can causation be reduced to some form of counterfactual dependency? Could a material duplicate fail to be a psychological duplicate? To answer these and similar questions, one must gain knowledge about metaphysical possibilities and necessities. One must …

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John Schwenkler September 17, 2018 September 24, 2018 books

We are grateful to Edouard Machery for blogging this week on Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds (Oxford, 2017). To view all his posts on a single page, please click here. And watch this space for updates on other upcoming events at Brains.

Do We See Scale?

Paul Linton June 29, 2018 June 29, 2018 Cognition / Paul Linton: The Perception and Cognition of Visual Space / perception / Psychology

In my final post I consider whether all our visual cues to scale function at the level of cognition rather than vision, and the kind of theory that ‘vision without scale’ would imply. 1. Physiological Cues There are two aspects to 3D vision: shape and scale. So far we have …