Genus Specious

In the last post I questioned G.A. Cohen’s critique of the Labour Theory of Value, which comes in two parts: (1) the LTV involves a…

As I was writing on Marx on value, a few analytic political philosophers recommended this essay to me: Gerry Cohen’s “The Labor Theory of…

In 1932 L. Susan Stebbing gave a wonderful presentation to the Aristotelian Society, on ‘The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics’.

Medieval philosophers spoke of words being ‘imposed’ for things, either directly or by way of the ideas of things. When we acquire…

Hao Wang’s second book on Gödel, A Logical Journey, explores a number of interesting relationships: between mathematics and philosophy…

I’ve been reading through George Eliot’s translation of Spinoza, now available in a very nice edition edited by Clare Carlisle. The…

It is accepted, even by more sympathetic readers than me, that Locke’s theory of inference leaves something to be desired.

A Twitter conversation about the names of syllogisms made me remember that I couldn’t find a useful, short online guide to using the…

Spinoza makes the odd claim in Proposition 7 of Part One the Ethics, that it pertains to the nature of a substance to exist. In one sense…

Before Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay discovered that their true calling was skewering feminazis over Ethics in Humanities Journalism…

Geometry and Deduction

In an earlier post, I wrote about Spinoza’s rejection of a standard theological argument against his proposition, to the effect that God…

After reading Paul Krugman’s attempt to grapple with Functional Finance, I happened to browse through Wendy Carlin and David Soskice’s…

I had an interesting chat on Twitter with David Andolfatto (who was very generous), concerning the government budget constraint in…

One way of interpreting Descartes’s cogito argument is as an attempt to prove the existence of a thought. Begin with Descartes’s…

I’m full of ideas from a wonderful event organised by Simon Hewitt at the University of Leeds: Approaches to Contradiction, Old and New…

Someone pointed out that my last post sounded a bit like McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time. True, I’m usually thinking about…

Markus Gabriel is an interesting character. He’s enough in the ‘Continental’ tradition to have co-authored a book with Slavoj Zizek (I’m…

Imagine that you have no discernible talents. You are not very intelligent. You are not particularly athletic. You are not good-looking…

Again I don’t have time to work this out properly; again I’m throwing it up for helpful comments/corrections.

Peter Geach has a weird criticism of Bentham’s utilitarianism in his book The Virtues. He objects to having “the greatest happiness for the…

In her essay on Practical Inference, Anscombe argued that practical reasoning is not formally distinct from theoretical reasoning.

In a previous post I looked at Collingwood’s attempted revolution in logic and its anti-realist implications. Sam Lebens raised the…