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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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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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…
