Hobbes, Hume, and Kant alike sympathetic to the thought that “there must be something more,” and sensitive to the limits of speculating about God

ShareKnowledgeRead another response about KnowledgeI recently watched a tv show that produced a line of questioning in my head on the virtue of reality. How do we define reality? What's the difference between reality and a world that is the perfect replication of reality? What would be the difference between the two worlds? Is it truly possible to know when we are living in reality? I guess I'm mostly asking if there is work form past philosophers that I could read on the subject? View the discussion thread.

2018.09.07 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Sarah Moss, Probabilistic Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 2018, 268pp., $54.00  (hbk), ISBN 9780198792154. Reviewed by Kenny Easwaran, Texas A&M University This is a work in epistemology focused on the issues of contextualism and pragmatic encroachment. This is also a work in philosophy of language focused on the semantics of epistemic modals and indicative conditionals. On Moss's view, many problems in all four of these areas can be addressed if we dethrone the "proposition" as the supposed object of belief, assertion, and knowledge, and replace it instead with "probabilistic content". While there are connections to issues in formal epistemology (and formal epistemologists will certainly want to read at least a few sections of this book, if not the whole thing), it is knowledge and language that take center stage. A "probabilistic content", for Moss, is a... Read More

I have a problem with patience in publishing. Or maybe I don't. I'm not sure. Let me explain what I mean, and then invite you to share your thoughts and experiences. When I read this piece that I shared earlier today, it resonated with me--not because the story has any particular lessons to teach us, but simply because I empathized with the author's experience of just how long and frustrating it can be to see a piece from its inception to eventual publication. A number of years ago in grad school, I had a couple of experiences that always stuck with me. The first was a discussion during office hours with a now-very-influential member of our discipline. To the best of my recollection, I was talking about how frustrated I was with a paper of mine--one I received a lot of positive feedback, but that I just couldn't get published anywhere and had bounced around at a bunch of journals. Basically, she told me something like, "Oh, that's totally normal. It took. . .

Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Humbolt University) shared this interesting story of a four-year publishing ordeal. A brief excerpt from the introduction: This is the story of the obstacles that a scholarly manuscript has to overcome before it eventually gets printed. It can confirm the impression, shared by many, that much in the publication process of such a text depends on pure chance, good (or bad) luck, and contingent circumstances. Perhaps it can be of comfort to younger scholars who are undergoing this process... I'm not sure the story will be of much comfort to younger scholars--but I guess it does make me feel a bit less alone when I get frustrated with things, so I figured I'd share it (shared from Leiter Reports).

by Monica McCarthy My love for philosophy began my freshman year at Pepperdine University in a program called in The Great Books Colloquium. I was ... Read more...

When I began my academic career, most of my effort focused on teaching, research and advising. Over the years, administrative tasks have devoured more and more of my time. One of the most ravenous beasts in the administrative pack is assessment. This data is now critical for accreditation and an essential part of how state funding is allocated under the punitive performance-based funding system that the state has imposed on public higher education. Back when assessment became part of the bureaucracy, the main goal was to fill binders with paper containing outcome data. After several years of this, there was a realization that outcome data by itself did not show the value added by the educational process. To use an obvious analogy, if you just looked at the times of a cross country team at the end of the season with a new coach, you would be hard pressed to determine the impact of the coach. Because of this, measuring improvement eventually became a thing to do. As part of the current. . .

2018.09.06 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Jon Robson and Grant Tavinor (eds.), The Aesthetics of Videogames, Routledge, 2018, 235pp., $140.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781138629585. Reviewed by Wesley D. Cray, Texas Christian University Philosophical investigation into both games in general and videogames in particular has increased markedly as of late. Some scholars will view this development positively, seeing games and videogames as capable of possessing aesthetic, artistic, and narrative idiosyncrasies meriting philosophical examination as well as taking them to offer illuminating parallels and contrasts with antecedently legitimized and well-studied media such as film and the novel. Others will view this development negatively, lamenting that inquiry into games and videogames will ultimately offer little in terms of new and serious philosophical insight into either the subjects themselves or the more well-studied media which they might be taken to. . .

[New Entry by Anca Gheaus on September 4, 2018.] Over the past decades, political philosophers and applied ethicists have been increasingly interested in the value of personal relationships. The goods they generate - or, perhaps, of which they consist - are obviously important, both instrumentally and non-instrumentally, for how well individuals' lives go on various accounts of what makes a life good: They are highly desired by most people, can bring a lot of pleasure and joy and, at least some of them - such as friendship or love - have objective value. More...