Victor's website

Author: victor

  • My CD Project

    When adding albums to your streaming collections costs a few seconds, and life involves less free time than it did when you were twenty, it’s easy to lose touch with music. It just doesn’t feel as meaningful. You neglect old loves and fail to find new ones — maybe not entirely, but as a general…

  • Yablo on being true about

    In his book Aboutness, Stephen Yablo wants to explain to us when a sentence that is false is nevertheless true about a topic. I suppose ‘all philosophers have long hair’ is false, but it is true about me. Yablo’s construction uses possible worlds, and in particular the idea of a subject matter m which is…

  • Chronological list

    This is a chronological list of papers and books that receive dedicated videos on my YouTube Channel. 1641 – René Descartes – Meditations on First Philosophy playlist1781 – Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason playlist1872 – Louis Auguste Blanqui – Eternity by the Stars video1895 – Lewis Carroll – What the Tortoise Said to…

  • 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.