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Correction to my post: it should have read “when I went to her home last summer”.
I first met Gabriele Taylor when I was a graduate student in philosophy at St. Anne’s, studying for the B.Phil.…
Dear Roger of Invisible America, Your remarks towards the end of this comment about Nat Goldhaber (I’ve got a friend…
A remembered Dreyfus remark on the Maharishi: I recall hearing Dreyfus say in a recorded lecture, perhaps twenty-five years ago,…
I just published in the new PPA and can say it was one of the most difficult, rigorous R&R’s of…
I am a freelance editor that works entirely for major university presses. I’ve even been brought in when outsourced book…
My colleague and I published a textbook with a major publisher several years ago, and the process was much like…
Here. (Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)
Feel free to continue the discussion here. (I gather from the last thread on Unger that the 3 Quarks discussion sections tend to go off the rails.)
Every time a piece of philosophy comes out for public consumption that 'analyses' stuff you can buy from Ikea I die a little more inside. I think it's time to hire a PR firm.
In my comment on the previous Unger post, I latched onto Unger's claim that nothing ever got established in philosophy. Although Unger did claim that in the interview, it's now clear that the thrust of his book, Empty Ideas, is quite different. The thesis of this book is that (mainstream, analytic) philosophers do not propose theories that "delineate a way for concrete reality to be which differs from other ways for it to be" or, using Unger's proposed terminology, philosophers now work only with concretely empty ideas. Instead, Unger claims, such philosophers content themselves to philosophizing merely about the use of and connections between certain words.
I haven't read the whole book yet, but here is a counterexample off the top of my head (although I realize that Unger has chosen not to deal with Ethics, I think this is mainstream enough to be fair game): Cornell Realism, which includes the view that ethics is part of the woodwork of concrete reality. Although, to not mix metaphors, I should say that ethics is part of the "cement" of concrete reality.
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