Philosophers’ Carnival #73
Here.
Does your inspiration come from the laboratory or the library?
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.
A survey of the philosophy of psychology
A little while ago, I wrote a chapter surveying the philosophy of psychology for Fritz Allhoff’s Philosophy of the Special Sciences. It obviously reflects my interests and is also somewhat partial. I somewhat traded breadth for a (somewhat) deeper treatment of the issues I was discussing. Some of you might be …
Computation in Cognitive Science Conference
Tomorrow I’m leaving for two weeks in the UK. Among other things, I’ll be at a conference on Computation in Cognitive Science at King’s College, Cambridge. My paper for the conference (co-authored with Andrea Scarantino) is entitled “Computation vs. Information Processing: How They Are Different and Why It Matters.” It has just …
Philosophers’ Carnival #72
Here.
Paul Churchland’s Neurophilosophy
Paul Churchland, Neurophilosophy at Work, CUP, 2007.I just finished Paul Churchland’s latest book, a collection of essays published by him during the last 10 years. They cover many topics: how to give a neurobiological account of consciousness, why functionalism is wrong, why (non-classical) connectionism is the way to go, how to …
Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Philosophy
Thanks for the interesting comments on my post on the psychology of philosophy, in which I asked whether some philosophers’ resistance to naturalism might be due to extra-rational psychological factors.In addition to those who posted, Blake Myers emailed me pointing out that much of Paul Bloom’s work (the Yale psychologist) …