Dave Maier spent many years as a radio DJ, but after even public radio turned hostile to esoteric music, he left to study philosophy at Columbia. Now, after earning a Ph. D. in the subject, he spends far too much time reading and not nearly enough time writing. He blogs, or has blogged, at duckrabbit.blogspot.com, where at least there is some good stuff in the archives. Email: duck1887 [at] hotmail.com
by Dave Maier Philosophers have spilled a great deal of ink attempting to nail down once and for all the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing’s being a work of art. Many theories have been proposed, which can seem in retrospect to have been motivated by particular works or movements in the history of…
by Dave Maier “Realism” is a word with many senses. In politics, it’s synonymous with pragmatism in being the alternative to idealism, which it considers naive. In science, realists oppose instrumentalism and (extreme forms of) empiricism, positing a reality behind the phenomena of empirical investigation. In philosophy as well, one can be a realist about…
by Dave Maier In the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche levels a powerful attack on the modern Platonistic conception of mind and nature, urging us to reject such “contradictory concepts” as “knowledge in itself,” or the idea of “an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting…
by Dave Maier A contemporary truism, ironically enough, is that we now live in a “post-truth” era, as attested by a number of recent books with that or similar titles, related by their authors with varying degrees of chagrin. We all know the ultimate, or at least proximate, source of this concern: that fount of…
by Dave Maier It’s been a while since I posted on this issue, and I’ve already said most of what I intended to say about it, but things seem to be coming to a head in my own state, and I thought I’d report on that, including a couple of weird local wrinkles (the Garden…
by Dave Maier No, it’s not that time of year just yet! However, since my yearly lists aren’t always exactly best-of-year lists anyway, I thought I might get the jump on everyone else, before we’re all best-of-year’ed out. (I should do sets more often anyway …) About half of these tracks are from 2018, and…
by Dave Maier The other day here at 3QD, philosopher Guy Elgat provided an interesting discussion of the conspiracy theory Q-Anon and some relevant philosophical issues about knowledge and rationality. In particular, he focused on a seemingly perverse response by Q-ers to our challenge to provide proof of their outlandish claims: that we “don’t have…
by Dave Maier If someone accuses you of “ethnocentrism,” they’re probably saying that you come off as arrogant or dogmatic in rejecting other cultures’ practices as illegitimate or inferior. Richard Rorty, however, applies that term to himself, and indeed takes it to be a central part of his own view. Since he’s not, I take…
by Dave Maier Recently I’ve been reading a couple of books attacking postmodernism and/or leftist politics, which the authors – not surprisingly – tie together as closely as they can, albeit from rather different perspectives, for maximum polemical effect. Maybe we’ll get into the gory details some other time (haven’t got very far into them yet),…
by Dave Maier I’ve always been a big fan of logic puzzles, especially Japanese ones (heyawake, nurikabe, gokigen naname, hashiwokakero), but I recently ran across another kind of puzzle which has been driving me crazy. So I thought I would share it with you, so maybe you also may be driven crazy. You’re welcome! I…
by Dave Maier So Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and a number of other brash rebels daring to challenge the stifling intellectual status quo, in which one is not allowed to criticize anyone from other cultures, because multiculturalism or Marxism or something, are part of, I am not making this up, the Intellectual Dark Web. Fine,…
by Dave Maier One starting point for any philosophical account of language is that the truth of a statement depends both on what it means and on how the world is. Handily for contemporary pragmatists of my stripe, this fits neatly with the post-Davidsonian project of overcoming the dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content.…
by Dave Maier In 1985, by his own account, the filmmaker Wim Wenders had no interest in dance, and had to be dragged to a performance of choreographer Pina Bausch’s Café Müller by his companion, actress Solveig Dommartin (you remember her, she’s in Wings of Desire). However, he found himself so moved by the performance…
by Dave Maier A few posts ago I distinguished between philosophical and scientific/practical questions about the objectivity of science, and urged that we not get them mixed up. There’s a lot more to say about that, so here’s another chapter in our continuing story. Philosophical questions about objectivity are metaphysical questions, and of course we…
by Dave Maier A reader writes in to ask a question about skepticism. Enrique asks: I get confused with the dream argument. It confuses me to read the argument of the dream because I see several interpretations. Do they refer to the dreams we all experience while sleeping? Or do they refer to a class…
by Dave Maier It’s that time of year again already – time to remind everyone that it’s that time of year again! I must admit I didn’t listen to a whole lot of new music this year, but I have definitely rounded up a good selection for you, even if there’s probably a whole lot…
by Dave Maier Nowadays the term “postmodernism” is synonymous with a certain sort of trendy, obscurantist philosophical nihilism, the self-consciously radical negation of solid common sense (“Words have no meanings!” “There is no truth!”). This is a shame, as it seems that one might very well criticize certain aspects of the modern era in an…
by Dave Maier If you google the name “Matt Shoemaker,” the first page of hits is all about the gentleman pictured here, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels. It seems that he has recently undergone season-ending surgery on his pitching arm, a shame as the Angels are still in the mix for an AL…
by Dave Maier Previous installments: pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3 A few months back I wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper, the first time I had ever done that, and they printed it. A number of legislators in my state had held a news conference announcing their plan to legalize,…
by Dave Maier Epistemology books (in the previous century anyway) pretty much all start out the same way. Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge, and so the first thing we have to do is to determine What Knowledge Is, before then going on to find out how best to get it, confirm that we have…