thoughts on the important distinction between ‘material’ and ‘social’ properties and relations in Marxist analysis
All in analytic
Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of crises from chapter 2 of ‘Reform or Revolution’, similarities to the 2008 crisis, and general comments on characteristically Marxist methods of analyzing the economy.
I describe how we might understand our ‘identity’ in the normative sense, through Wilfred Sellars’ framework from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. I connect this to discussions of Kantian understandings of the sources of our obligations.
An understanding of patterns of behaviors within institutions, taking notes from natural selection and the works of G.A. Cohen and Anwar Shaikh.
Concepts, Methods, & Heuristics in Proofs and Refutations - Chapter 1, §4
An ongoing list of the concepts, methods, and heuristics used by the characters of Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, by Imre Lakatos. This is what I would have found useful the first time reading Proofs and Refutations, and I hope you find it useful too.
Chapter 1, §4 focuses on methods for responding to global counterexamples of a proof.
The Buck Stops in the Space of Reasons
An essay that displays a basic comprehension of one of Sellars’ main ideas from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (The Myth of the Given).
Concepts, Methods, & Heuristics in Proofs and Refutations - Chapter 1, §§1-3
An ongoing list of the concepts, methods, and heuristics used by the characters of Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, by Imre Lakatos. This is what I would have found useful the first time reading Proofs and Refutations, and I hope you find it useful too.
Chapter 1, §§1-3 focus on a proposed proof for the Descartes-Euler conjecture (the Cauchy proof) and types of counterexamples.
Two Ways of Thinking About ‘Meta’-ness
Some meta-philosophy about how we might think about the potential for an infinite recursion of ‘meta’-ness in philosophy.
An Asymmetry in Is/Ought
Statements about what is the case do not seem to imply what ought to be—but statements about what ought to be must imply certain things about what is the case. This post describes that observation, plus describes why I think the observation is helpful.
When Meaning Isn’t Use
Wittgenstein is famous for saying that meaning is use. But in the text, he says this is only so for “a large class of cases”. Why not for all cases?
A Philosophical Joke
This is the joke that made me understand what Wittgenstein meant when he said “that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious).”
Fruitful Explication in Philosophical Investigations
I find later-Wittgenstein more convincing than Carnap and the Vienna Circle where their views disagree about metaphysics and language. Yet as I am sympathetic to the idea that a thoughtful coordination of philosophy and science can be fruitful, I am glad to see some compatibility among later-Wittgenstein and Carnap’s views in “On Explication”.