The title of this post is my favorite quote from J. Heil, From An Ontological Point of View, OUP, 2003 (from p. 248).Heil’s point is that “The zombie possibility turns on substantive philosophical theses concerning properties, powers, and laws of nature. I have argued at length, and on independent grounds, against these …
The program of the European Congress of Analytical Philosophy is here. There are some interesting papers for readers of Brains, for example Stanisław Krajewski will present his short argument against all Lucas- and Penrose-style arguments. I wrote a protocol of his habilitation colloquium back in 2004 (or earlier) – he …
The preliminary program of the 2008 Philosophy of Science Association Meeting is out. The meeting will take place on November 6–8, 2008, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There will be many talks on the sciences of minds and brains, including a symposium I organized, on “Neural Computation” (other participants: Carl Craver, Oron Shagrir, and Jackie …
The CFP for the next conference of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology is out. The conference will take place in Savannah, GA over Easter weekend, i.e., Thursday April 9 to Saturday April 11, 2009.I am the program chair. I want to call your attention to a new feature of …
Many thanks to Mark Sprevak for organizing the fabulous conference on computation in cognitive science that took place on July 7-8 at King’s College, Cambridge. Several of us Brains contributors (Aizawa, Gillett, Rusanen, Weiskopf, and me) were there. I had a great time. The papers were excellent: although they are drafts, reading …
Here.
Penelope Maddy’s book Second Philosophy is exhilarating in its scope and content. She advocates a brand of methodological naturalism she denotes ‘Second Philosophy.’
The first section of the book is Maddy’s exposition of The Second Philosophy. She doesn’t define it explicitly. Rather, she explores the principles via a series of historical clashes. First, how would the second philosopher (SP) respond to Descartes’ arguments in the Meditations? She then goes on to tackle radical skepticism, Hume, Kant, Carnap, Quine, and Putnam’s anti-realism in the voice of the SP.
More summary and analysis below the fold.
