Philosophers’ Corner

  • Two Skeptical Arguments

    Posted by John Greco I’ve been claiming that there are some really powerful skeptical arguments…

  • The Place of Scepticism and Sceptical Arguments

    I should start with a confession about my philosophical tastes. I tend not to find epistemology the most gripping of philosophical subjects. Roughly, epistemology has to do with the nature of knowledge. And a big part of epistemology historically has been devoted to answering the sceptic who challenges us to say whether and how we can know anything at all.

  • Thoughts on the Reader

    Thanks to everybody who made our  First Annual Dionysus Awards Show  such a success.  It was…

  • The First Annual Dionysus Awards

    Philosophy Talk is initiating a new movie award. I know; I know. Do we really need yet another movie award? We’ve got the Oscars; the Golden Globe; the National Society of Film Critics, the People’s Choice Awards …. So what’s the point of another, you ask?

  • Philosophy and history

    It seems likely that an important part of the evolution of language (and thought and…

  • Rawls

      When I was in graduate school at Cornell from 1964 until 1968, and for…

  • Why not buy and sell kidneys?

      Commerce in certain bodily parts is allowed, at least if we define `bodily part’…

  • Legal Ethics

    My father, grandfather and uncle were lawyers, in the small firm then called “Perry & Perry” in Lincoln, Nebraska, and my cousin and his son continue in that firm, now known as “Perry, Guthery, Haase & Gessford”. If the Danforth Foundation hadn’t kindly offered me a fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell, I would have followed the family tradition. It never occurred to me, as I was growing up, the law was anything but the most honorable of professions.

  • Emergence: Live Blogging

    Share your thoughts about today’s show.     Don’t have time to add any thoughts…

  • Separation of Powers and the Charismatic Presidency

    The founding fathers in their considerable wisdom took the separation of powers to be a “bulwark of liberty.” Indeed, they took the concentration of power into a single agency to be the very definition of tyranny. Conversely, they apparently believed that not just the formal separation of powers among the branches of the federal government and between the federal and state governments, but also what might be called the subsantive seperation of political interests to which the formally separated branches are asnwerable, was the key to a government that was unlikely to ever devolve into tyranny.

  • Dualism Strikes Back? Live Blogging!

    There’s almost no rational grounds for currently believing in old-fashioned Cartesian Dualism of the mind and body. According to that form of dualism, the mind and body were two metaphysically distinct substances — with the body being extended in space and the mind being an immaterial somewhat, with no extension, no location.