Tag: epistemology

• May 24, 2014

  Mind and world: Isolation or world-involvement

  Recall where we are. We are in the midst of dismantling an erroneous picture of the mind and, in so doing, we are making it possible to inquire into the everyday mental activities we perform: into how they operate, into how they involve us n the world, and into how to bring them out when they…
• March 17, 2014

  Withdrawing from Ultimate Tests

  Dear Philosophical Friend, I thought my claim about the impossibility of ultimate tests was too rushed and unclear. Let me try again here. Let P be an Ultimate Test for some question Q. Let question Q be, e.g.: ‘Is Smith truly, ultimately trustworthy?’ There are three ways that P can go awry: 1.) P can be so overly…
• May 12, 2012

  Kant’s tribunal (V)

  V One of Hegel’s enigmatic theses from the Preface to The Philosophy of Right is that the actual is rational. The contemporary scholar Robert Pippin glosses this proposition–rightly, in my view–as a demand that being be intelligible. As human beings, we long for order in reality so much so that is scarcely conceivable that we…
• May 11, 2012

  Locke’s qualities (IV)

  IV The sober minded Englishman John Locke read the Frenchman Descartes’ work approvingly, finding the “way of ideas” especially edifying for his empirical pursuits into the question of what we can know. Just as we must first examine our instruments before we can attend to what the instruments are measuring, so, Locke insisted, we must…