Friday, January 08, 2010

Linkable Links

* Ron Leonard, Testing the Validity of Conditional Arguments Using Physical Models (PDF)

* P. S. Ruckman, Jr., gives his list of the top ten clemency stories of 2009 at "Pardon Power".

* Rothbard on Buridan on money.

* A BBC radio program on Thomas Aquinas.

* Ralph Wedgwood discusses what he thinks is the deepest error in Kant's ethics. It leads to some interesting discussion. I'm not sure it's the 'deepest error', but I would agree that it's an important one, for reasons too complicated to get into here.

* Massimo Pigliucci has a YouTube video on David Hume. I'm afraid I'm not impressed of it as a description of, or even an introduction to, Hume, even setting aside the fact that 'jovial' is not the word to describe the affable but very phlegmatic Hume. It's a series of the standard sort of garblings of Hume, and myths about him, that arise when 'skeptics' uncritically read their own concerns into Hume's text, sometimes on the basis of work done decades and decades ago, before much work had been done on Hume's historical context. But it's useful for summarizing a common and persistent view of Hume, in which Hume's often very subtle skeptical maneuvers are broadened and flattened for the purposes of a less impressively thought-out skepticism.

* Possony and Pournelle's classic work on technological warfare.

* Jonathan Jarrett on the medieval warming period.