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    Category: Jon Cogburn

    • Helen De Cruz’s posts on what philosophers do showcased by the Atlantic Monthly

      The article by Atlantic Monthly Senior Editor Rebecca Rosen is HERE. Pretty Cool! De Cruz's posts actually produced postive national coverage of academic philosophy. The Rosen article is currently at the top of their web page.

    • Did Russell’s Paradox entail that set theory is incomplete (if axiomatized)?

      Tonight I was fondly recalling Michael Hand and Jonathan Kvanvig's old paper on Tennant's solution to Fitch's Paradox (it's a beautiful read) and a weird thought occured to me. Hand and Kvanvig argue that Tennant's solution would be analogous to a set theorist responding to Russell's Paradox by proposing naive set theory with Frege's comprehension…

    • The Causal Power of Non-existing Events

      While glancing through Graham Priest's new book I came across a place where he said something to the effect that what distinguished existing from non-existing things was whether or not the thing in question was causally efficacious. Following up on Mark Lance's suggestion that we should be most skeptical when a philosopher suggests something taken…

    • What’s the deal with closeups of people chewing food in LSD movies?

      Check out all the people chewing around the 4:00 minute mark of the video at right. I don't get this. Close ups of people eating are disgusting, yet they form a fairly reliable trope in LSD movies. If you've suffered through the entire Magical Mystery Tour movie, then the infamous spaghetti scene is traumatically imprinted…

    • Any good recent overviews on theories of vagueness?

      Near the end of summer the LSU philosophy reading group is going to begin reading things on vagueness. We're going to start with Rosanna Keefe's excellent Theories of Vagueness, which gives an excellent overview of the state of the field circa 2000. We don't really know where to go from there, since so much has…

    • It takes a village. . .

      One of the worst things that can happen to someone is that they become so powerful in their field that the community no longer works as a check on their behavior. We should pity their victims more, but we should also have some sympathy for people like Dov Charney and  Terry Richardson. Who in their…

    • Analytic philosophy and rules bloat

      If I could go back in time and change the Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy anthology in one way, I would make sure that it included an essay on rules bloat. Nearly every role playing game suffers from this. At the outset the impetus is to present something that is easy for new players and…

    • First successful British punk single

      The drum sound on this is a thing of wonder. I wish George Martin had achieved something like it for Ringo's toms during the White Album sessions. Or maybe Ringo just needed to pound them harder. I don't know. The snare and symbols are wonderful, but the wimpy toms make songs like Helter Skelter fall…

    • Badiou against the Angles, the Saxons, and the Vikings too

      Wow Badiou says some weird things about analytic philosophy in the Introduction to Being and Event. The 'analytic' current of English-language philosophy discounts most of classical philosophy's propositions as senseless, or as limited to the exercise of a language game (1). . . .for Kant, the transcendental subject, after which the question [of the utility…

    • Presbyterian General Assembly votes for gay marriage and divestment

      Good news from San Fransisco Theological Seminary chaplain Scott Clark about the 2014 Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly here. The bill sent out from committee a couple of days ago would take the "one man, one woman" talk out of the Book of Order and add an accompanying authoritative interpretation that allows teaching elders to…