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Huiswerk
Hester was met Amber naar zangles. Alec wilde graag iets met mij doen, maar ik vertelde hem dat ik eerst een brief moest schrijven. Een irritant klusje trouwens; het is namelijk een poging om de scholenkoepel zover te krijgen dat ze de plusklas in Houten voor ons gaan betalen. Dat doen ze niet, zo hebben…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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Reflection #3: Against metaphysical possibility
Can a crocodile and a rooster mate and get a young? Disappointingly, they cannot. It’s impossible. Of course this impossibility has to be established empirically, either by trying to get a rooster and a crocodile to mate; or, more plausibly, by developing an understanding of reproductive processes and genetics that allows us to say with…
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Reflection #2: Normativity and Korsgaard
I’ve just read The Sources of Normativity, the 1992 Tanner Lectures of Christine M. Korsgaard. The book was recommended to me by my colleague Tim Meijers after I came into his office bothering him about duties. Not his duties, but the nature of duties. See, I don’t really get duties; or rather, what I don’t…
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Reflection #1: Judgement and Practice
I look out of the window and see that it rains. I judge that it rains. Now my colleague Thomas Fossen (in his new book, Facing Authority) tells me that judgement is different depending on practical consequences. My judgement that the Putin regime is illegitimate is not the same as a Russian person’s judgement that…