Pleasure isn’t all we care about that. Is the same true of happiness? If religion had a positive effect on happiness, would you want to be religious? Could Paris Hilton ever be happy?
Is philosophy more like art than science?
May 2, 2013 By 5 Comments
A response to James Croft. Spoiler alert: I think the answer is “no.”
Why isn’t there more progress in philosophy?
April 27, 2013 By 1 Comment
Now that I’m done expressing my skepticism of Chalmers’ claims about progress in philosophy of mind, I want to look at the explanations he gives for why there hasn’t been more progress in philosophy.
Chalmers on philosophical progress, part 1.5: behaviorism
April 26, 2013 By 11 Comments
In part 1, I talked about Chalmers’ proposed kinds of philosophical progress, and expressed some skepticism about them. I was going to make the next post about the explanations Chalmers considers for why there hasn’t been more progress, but first,
I need to read more Derek Parfit
April 23, 2013 By 4 Comments
Brian Leiter links to a fascinating interview with Larissa MacFarquhar, who has among other things profiled philosopher Derek Parfit. I’ve become acquainted with Parfit’s ideas on personal identity through the classes I’ve taken on metaphysics as well as Chalmers’ paper on the singularity, but I confess I’ve never read any of Parfit’s books before. From [...]
Chalmers on philosophical progress, part 1
April 23, 2013 By 15 Comments
In the comments on my post where I summarized the problems I see with philosophy, Alexander Johannesen very helpfully linked to a paper by David Chalmers on progress in philosophy. I hadn’t seen this paper before, so let’s have a look at it.
A shift of emphasis
April 22, 2013 By 4 Comments
For awhile now, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to spend less time criticizing religion, and more time working on issues related to AI and existential risk. I don’t currently have any plans of going as far as Luke Muehlhauser of Common Sense Atheism did, and abandon writing about religion entirely, but you may notice [...]
A summary of the problems I see with philosophy–and why I’m thinking of going back anyway
April 21, 2013 By 35 Comments
This is a post I’ve been struggling to write for awhile. It’s a response to a couple questions I got in the March open thread, one by someone who wanted to have a “link handy when I want to show people just how crappy (analytic) philosophy is,” while the other asked, “Since you spend a [...]
De-cluttering is not effective altruism: review of Jeff Shinabarger’s More or Less
April 17, 2013 By 2 Comments
When my contact at Patheos forwarded me an e-mail about the book club Patheos was going to be doing on Jeff Shinabarger’s book More or Less: Choosing a Lifestyle of Excessive Generosity, I was excited. It may have been just the subtitle that did it; if not the subtitle, then the book’s website with its [...]
Semi-consequentialism
April 12, 2013 By 5 Comments
This is a brief “throwing an idea out there” post: I’d like to coin the term “semi-consequentialism,” for the view that the consequences of our actions on people’s well-being is of central moral importance, without being committed to the theses often associated with consequentialism that (1) maximizing well-being is obligatory or even that (2) it’s [...]
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