A Worm in Cheese

Campanella and Spinoza On Perspective It has long been my suspicion that Spinoza had read, and has a debt to the much forgotten Tommaso Campanella. There is evidence that Descartes’ most central contributions have in some way be under this influence, and Spinoza’s position indeed is in many ways a response to Cartesianism. But it more [...]

The Trick of Dogs: Etiologic, Affect and Triangulation, Part II of IV

 ◦                   ◦                   ◦ A Davidsonian Completion of Wittgenstein: Two Pictures of Language  [continued from Part I, here is Part III] The second part of this paper seeks to answer the vexing question: Given the widest of views that Augustine’s description offers, that of a panpsychic reality understood and filtered through our linguistic capacities to describe [...]

Chalmers’ Rough Thoughts On Spinoza and Panprotopsychism

Below is a question and answer over the idea that Spinoza may have been the first to present the idea of a Zombie World, not while considering a logical hypothetical, but in describing our own world, expressed here Does Spinoza present a Zombie World?  David Chalmers: Interesting. I don’t think that a spiritual automaton world is a zombie world, though. [...]

A Spoonful of Ought

Some Thoughts on the Is-Ought Distinction                    Hume famously said that he noticed something very peculiar in the arguments of those making moral arguments. They would always conducted this curious kind shift, from “is” statements to “ought” statements. This is how he put it: In every system of morality, [...]

The Trick of Dogs: Etiologic, Affection and Triangulation, Part I of IV

[Part II here] Intentions: Deceiving Dogs, and Pretentious Infants …and so it seems that, even though they themselves cannot know, they nonetheless wish to be known.  Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, Book XI, chapter 27             The purposeof this study is to investigate the possible connections between Wittgenstein’s [...]

The Condensation of Specificity: Paul’s Use of “stoicheia”

Paul’s Rhetorical Use of “stoicheia” in Galatians 4:3,9   When contemplating the rapid spread of Christianity, thought often turns to the brilliance of Paul. How else can one account for the meteoric rise of what was initial a local Jewish cult, to the level of a pan-Hellenic spiritual force, if not for that particular conceptual [...]

Sharing a Form of Life? Section 241

241. “So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?”- It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.” And Davidson would tell us that they do not [...]

The Operated Jew and the Thinking Machine

In support of the thesis that much of the Behaviorist inspired thought-experiment horror (Zombies, Swampmen, Inhumanly raised Marys, even soulless Chinese Speakers and HAL’s), in the field of Philosophy of MInd, is really a philo-sociological issue, and issue between the difference between a person and a thing, and the concordant fears of what might erupt if [...]

John Donne’s Material Monism of Love, and Spinoza’s Eternity of the Mind

John Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning” articulates a metaphysics which makes of a death an anchor point, upon which a living being can compass itself, creating a death-defying eternity of affection. He speaks in seemingly dualist terms of a sublunary love “whose soul is sense” contrasted with a love “inter-assurèd of the mind”. In this he [...]

Skepticism refuted in Under Ten Minutes

Philosophy is part performance (as much as it would like to purge every element of the contingent from its expression). Without the performative of bodies, and affects of words, images, metaphors, analogies, meanings would circulate airlessly. Convicition is performed, and Peitho was a goddess. Watch Randy Helzerman “disprove” skepticism using Davidson’s notion of a Principle of Charity like [...]