On The Very Idea - A Philosophy Podcast

In this final episode of a three part series on John McDowell's Mind and World, I take a look at McDowell's Transcendental Argument. I feel his transcendental argument comes up a bit short in making McDowell's case and neither does it seem to hold the same gravitas as other transcendental arguments like Kant's. Basically, the conclusions sound a lot like the premise

In this second episode of a 3 part series on the work of John McDowell, I look at McDowell’s epistemic distinction between the active and the passive. When we perceive the world, are we soaking up empirical data like a dull sponge or actively sorting fuzzy, impressionistic content into familiar categories? For McDowell, perceptions are conceptual through and through. Despite this

In this first episode of a three part series on John McDowell, I talk a bit about the splash that McDowell's Mind and World made on the philosophy scene when it was published in 1994. Then, I get into and onto the work of McDowell's philosophy itself. Mind and World is quite the apt name as McDowell focuses on the meta-epistemological question of how the mind can know about the wor

In this final installment of a four episode series, I take a look at criticisms of Thomas Kuhn's idea of incommensurable scientific paradigms. Kuhn makes use of a vague notion of seeing that allows him to say some surprising things about how people see the world. For example, Kuhn theorizes that 18th century scientists Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier would have had different

In this third installment of a four part series on Thomas Kuhn and the allegedly incommensurable revolutions of science, I look at the idea of epistemic incommensurability. Last episode, I looked at semantic incommensurability - a more intuitively easier idea to get your head around. Semantic incommensurability is the idea that a shift in intensional meanings of a concept such as '

In this second episode of a four part series on the work of Thomas Kuhn, I look at his idea of semantic incommensurability. Semantic incommensurability as applied to science for Kuhn centers around the fact that the meaning of particular scientific terms change over time. These changes become radically different as scientific paradigms shift. 'Bile' and 'planet' meant something dif

In this first episode of a 4 part installment, I would like to look at scientific realism- the idea that science delivers truths about how the world actually ’is’ in reality. Under this view, science isn’t successful solely because it allows us to better cope with the world and our environment but because it’s theories are based on actual objective facts about reality. Scie

In this final part of a two part series on our ability to morally evaluate historical figures, I continue my look at the work of Bernard Williams. After taking into account Williams' theory of the relativism of distance, I look at British philosopher Miranda Fricker's criticism of Williams. Fricker believes that historical figures are capable of being morally blameworthy according

In this first episode of a two part series, I look at an issue that has been hot of late (are there any non-hot issues in the internet age?) – the issue of how we should judge our historical heritage – particularly the prominent figures of history. Winston Churchill, Christopher Columbus and others have had statues removed in public places along with a reassessment of their his

Apologies for the Buzzfeedesque title - In this final episode of a two-part series on the work of Donald Davidson, I look at Davidson’s work on a theory of meaning, his principle of charity, and, what he believed were his arguments that put the final nail in the coffin of empiricism. Davidson claims that we should develop a theory of meaning by imagining interpreting the utteranc