Philosophy’s New Take on Old Problems (Room for Debate)

The contributors: Knobe, Appiah, Maudlin, Williamson, Leiter, and Sosa.

The blurbs presumably meant to summarize their contributions:

• Knobe: “What we are seeing is a growing willingness to just ignore the whole distinction between philosophy and psychology.”
• Appiah: “The idea that philosophy has one distinctive method — phenomenological reflection, conceptual analysis, or what you will — simply excludes too much.”
• Maudlin: “Philosophy departments will continue to be the places where the desire for pure understanding takes precedence over everything else.”
• Williamson: “Philosophy has most to contribute to the pursuit of truth by refining its own distinctive methods, not by imitating other disciplines.”
• Leiter: “Philosophy remains the only humanistic discipline that really teaches students to think critically and analytically.”
• Sosa: “In principle, experimental philosophy is a welcome development; in practice, its attack on traditional methods has been unconvincing.”

A bit of discussion is ensuing at the X-Phi Blog and at Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants.

UPDATE: You can now add stories directly from Google Reader! (It’s way easy.)

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (by SEP)
• Ask Philosophers (AskPhil) (by Amherst College)
• The Republic by Plato (by IndiaNIC, LLC)
• The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (by IndiaNIC, LLC)
• Stanza (by Lexcycle)

Here are some non-free ones:

• Philosophy Bites ($2.99; forgot about this one in the original post)
• Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy – by Simon Blackburn ($14.99)

The first one, obviously, is the one more likely to be frequently valuable to philosophers. I’m quite surprised I hadn’t previously heard that the SEP has an iPhone app! Click on the links to learn about the others (just cancel the iTunes pop-up if you just want to read about them in your browser).

Any others I’m missing?

http://wordpress.org/showcase/the-internet-encyclopedia-of-philosophy/

It doesn’t do much, but it’s nice to be listed among the likes of The Harvard Gazette, Mozilla Labs, Larry King, and… well, Kim Kardashian.

You can find more (like ones on Aristotle, Hume, and others) on YouTube.

Science Saturday: Holding Back

Very cool video from Bloggingheads.tv.

In short, DeRose attempts to argue that the empirical results (including ones I’ve reported with some people) don’t undermine the ordinary language basis for contextualism. A nice discussion is ensuing on the blog.

“The Moral Life of Babies”

The video down the page a bit is pretty neato too.

http://www.templeton.org/reason/