-
Vogezen, deel 1
Zaterdag reden we om 9:30 weg van huis richting de Vogezen. Nog nooit gelukt, denk ik, zo vroeg weg zijn. Maar dit was dan ook de eerste keer dat we zo ver gingen zonder overnachting op de heenweg, dus we moesten wel. Veel al van tevoren ingepakt, wekker om zes uur gezet, en geknald. Vaak…
-
Chronological list
This is a chronological list of papers and books that receive dedicated videos on my YouTube Channel. It does not contain the names of papers and books that are merely mentioned in the video without itself being the prime topic. 1641 – René Descartes – Meditations on First Philosophy playlist1781 – Immanuel Kant – Critique…
-
Rorty’s late pragmatism
In 1996, Rorty gave a series of ten lectures in Girona, Spain. Only in 2021 were they printed as a book, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. Robert Brandom wrote a foreword in which he explains the argumentative shape of Rorty’s late pragmatism; the final form, so to speak, that Rorty’s philosophical thinking took. On the one hand,…
-
Empty thoughts, blind intuitions
One of the most famous sentences in the Critique of Pure Reason is: ‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.’ (A51/B75) If we have a correct and thorough understanding of this sentences, we are already well on our way understanding Kant’s philosophical project. But to get there, we must delve a lot…
-
Monty Hall Troubles
Here is a riddle I posted on Mastodon. If you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to think about it before reading on. You’re in a game show. There are three closed chests, 1, 2, and 3. One of them contains a prize, the other two are empty. You can choose one chest and…
-
Tensed Token Truths
I do not buy the Wittgensteinian claim that all philosophical problems are problem of language and disappear once we analyse our use of words. But some philosophical problems are like that. And one of them, I suspect, is the so-called problem of tensed token truths. (In this blog post, I’ll rely on a presentation of…
-
Skepticism, externalism, and transcendental idealism
External world skepticism is usually set up by first presenting two scenarios that are indistinguishable from each other. One is the good ‘real world’ scenario that we believe ourselves to be in. The other is the bad ‘skeptical’ scenario. It could be an evil demon deceiving us, or it could be that we are a…
-
The books 2023 – recommendations
Yesterday, I posted a list of the books I read in 2023. Today, I’ll pore over that list and make some recommendations! That’s not the same as telling you which of these books were the best. The best book on the list is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, an epoch-making work that has a serious…
-
The books (2023)
Full list of all the books I read (and finished) in 2023. It’s substantially shorter than last year’s, though pretty much in line with that of two years ago. I’ll write a separate post about which books were the best, the most interesting, or otherwise especially worth talking about.
-
Reflection #4: Kant, Hume, method, and the need for the Third Critique
One of Hume’s most famous positions, defended in both A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, is that we cannot use reason to gain knowledge of any causal relation or any regularity in the world. Hume argues that causation — at least insofar as we can know it — is merely…