Saturday, January 21, 2012

Notable and Noted Links

* The Atlantic has an interesting interview with Tim Maudlin on philosophy of physics.

* Bernard Yack reviews Virtue and Politics, edited by Blackledge and Knight, and discusses the relationship between MacIntyre's current Aristotelianism and his Marxist background.

* I was hoping to have something to say about John Wilkins's recent post on what he calls the Shandyan dilemma for historical disciplines. I'm not sure I actually have enough well-formed ideas to say anything, but the post is definitely worth reading.

* I was impressed by the post on Fact and Value in Lawrence Solum's legal theory lexicon series -- in a short space and simple language, he manages to locate the problem's relation to Hume's famous ought/is passage, and yet to avoid virtually all serious interpretive mistakes. This is no mean feat -- there's a lot of confused and confusing discussion of the subject. There are things I would say slightly differently, but, again, I was impressed; it takes considerable powers of summarization and clear thinking to write something this good at this level without getting tangled up.

* I loved this post at "Obliscent" : The Adventures of Magical Realist Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal In Colombia.

* Reformed philosopher Michael Sudduth has converted to Hinduism -- Vaishnava Vedanta, to be exact. As Bill Vallicella notes, it's a bit of a surprise, although people have been noticing Sudduth's extensive engagement with Hindu ideas for some time now. The turning point was apparently a religious experience of Krishna. I suppose a possible good consequence of this is that we may get more analytic discussions of Vaishnavism, which I think is actually needed -- analytic philosophers of religion tend to walk a tight treadmill of topics despite the fact that there are many issues that need to be clarified, whether for exposition, defense, or refutation, and getting them to look around will inevitably have some benefits. But judging from his conversion testimony, I suspect that we will have to wait a bit for anything along these lines from Sudduth; the convert's warm glow is not always the best environment for cool reasoning.

* John Corvino has a post at the Independent Gay Forum arguing that it is hypocritical (particularly for Catholics, I think, is the subtext, but it is not explicitly stated) to combine easy tolerance for remarriage after divorce with (at least certain kinds of) arguments against homosexual marriage. It's a very interesting argument, although Corvino doesn't develop it with proper care. There's some good discussion at the Volokh Conspiracy.

* Michael Flynn on Why the Future Never Gets the SF Right.

ADDED LATER

* Eric Schliesser has a post on shared myths among analytic philosophers; this is something I've always said, so I'll definitely have to check out the Candlish book that he mentions.

* Kenny Pearce discusses William King on free will