Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Linkabilia

 * Various Articles at the SEP
Margaret Schabas, Economics in Early Modern Philosophy
Karolina Hubner, Spinoza's Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind
Halla Kim, Korean Philosophy
Raphael Woolf, Cicero

* John Finnis & Robert George, Indictability of Early Abortion c. 1868 (PDF), discusses the legal status of abortion in nineteenth century America.

* Louis Caruana, The Jesuits and the Quiet Side of the Scientific Revolution (PDF)

* Paul Taborsky, Aristotle and Linearity in Substance, Measure, and Motion (PDF)

* Freelosophy is a new discussion forum for discussing papers in the PhilArchive.

* Sonny Bunch discusses the case of movies in which audiences take away different lessons than the movie-makers intend.

* Robert VerBruggen, How much leniency with criminals can we afford?, at City Journal

* Silvia De Toffoli, What Are Mathematical Diagrams? (PDF)

* Chiara Brozzo, Are Some Perfumes Works of Art? (PDF)

* Fabrizio Macagno, How can metaphors communicate arguments? (PDF)

* Zach Weber, This Paradoxical Life, discusses paraconsistent logic at Aeon.co. One thing that I think is not sufficiently clear in the article is that paraconsistent logic is not necessarily dialethic -- i.e., paraconsistent logics can work with contradictions, but most forms don't 'accept' the contradictions but just are able to work around them because they don't have what's called contradiction explosion. Aristotle's logic has a number of features that make it paraconsistent (although some late medieval adaptations of Aristotelian logic are not), for instance, and it is very much not dialethic or accepting of contradictions. It's just that if you accidentally assume contradictory things, then the logic won't 'explode' (in part because you can't infer anything from a contradiction in Aristotle's logic).

* Michael Barkasi, Perceiving is Imagining the Past

* Carlo Lancelotti, The Idea of Tradition in Del Noce

* Paul Musgrave, What the Kids Are Reading. Unsurprisingly, the answer is 'not much'. It's a serious pedagogical problem, because reading is something you do best if you do it a lot, and for difficult readings, people who don't read much end up being practically illiterate; and, beyond that, reading is a very effective way to be able to go much deeper into arguments and ideas than you otherwise could, so being practically illiterate guarantees a shallow grasp of a large number of topics. My own view, which is different from Musgrave's, is that it's just not negotiable: for some things, you need people to read enough to handle texts that go into depth on the subject, and thus lightening the reading load is self-defeating in the long run (although there are exceptions, since sometimes you can substitute easier readings for the same purpose). In such cases the pedagogical problem becomes not, "How much reading should be assigned?" but "What support needs to be put into place to make sure the students do the reading and are able to get out of it what they need?"

* James Pogue, This is not how civil wars start, criticizes the tendency of some in contemporary politics to stir up fears of civil war.

* Andrew Dennis Bassford, Ought Implies Can or Could Have (PDF). Of course, 'could have' is just a further-modalized 'can'.