Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Links of Note

 * Colin Marshall, Do All Roads Lead to Philosophy on Wikipedia? They Do About 97.3% of the Time, at "Open Culture". As noted in the article, Wikipedia is a constantly varying thing, so paths change, but here is the Wikipedia road from 'atmosphere of earth' to 'philosophy of language':

atmosphere of Earth -- gas -- states of matter -- physics -- natural science -- branches of science -- science -- scientific method -- empirical -- evidence -- proposition -- philosophy of language

* Jane Psmith reviews Dennis Rasmussen's Fears of a Setting Sun at "Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf"

* Fabio Lampert, Freedom, Omniscience, and the Contingent A Priori (PDF)

* ArchaeoEd, a podcast about ancient civilizations of the Americas

* Matthew David Segall, 'No Thinker Thinks Twice': On the Attempt to Catch Whitehead in the Act of Philosophizing, at "Footnotes2Plato"

* Andrej Čaja, John Henry Newman's Idea of a University as Critique of Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarian Conception of Education (PDF)

* Carlo DaVia, The Role of Aristotle in Gadamer's Work (PDF)

* Freddie deBoer, The Basics: Deference Politics

* Matthew Minerd, From Unity to Distinction to Unity: A Recovery of the Vocabulary of Various Mental Distinctions, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Monte Ransom Johnson, The Medical Background and Inductive Basis of Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean (PDF)

* Frederick Bauerschmidt, The Body of Christ Is Made from Bread: Transubstantiation and the Grammar of Creation, at "Church Life Journal"

* Jeff McMahan, Just War Theory and The Russia-Ukraine War, at "Blog of the APA". A much better discussion than most discussions of just war theory I have seen. I particularly like the recognition, essential to any accurate account of just war theory, that war, the situation, is not the same thing as war, the action, and it is the latter, not the former, that just war theory directly considers; it is astounding how many people equivocate between the two, including people who should know better. I also think that, while it needs some work, his account of the proportionality requirement is much better than you usually find. It's also good to see someone using the distinction between responsibility and culpability, which is quite important in this kind of context. The particular 'revisionist' version of just war theory that McMahan advocates, though, is not strictly tenable on human rights grounds, I think; soldiers have a basic right to self-defense because everyone does -- the basic form of the right does not depend on one's character. Granted, I think you can argue that respect for rights morally has to take a somewhat different form depending on whether things are being done justly or unjustly, and that there are particular rights, some of which may be related to more basic rights, that come from just action specifically and cannot be appealed to by people acting unjustly, but these are different matters and not relevant to things like basic self-defense. McMahan is also hampered on this particular point, I think, by not considering the full spectrum of reasons why a soldier might be fighting, and forgetting, on this point, at least, that part of just war theory is the recognizing that warring is only just as a means to just peace, and that how one understands the moral obligations in war is affected by what leaves open the possibility for bringing about just peace. This is historically one of the secondary reasons why people have accepted the 'moral equality of combatants', for instance; if you don't, then you can get into some nastily vicious cycles of war. But, that said, it is again one of the better discussions I have seen.