John L. Taylor
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.— Kurt Vonnegut Vonnegut’s admonition came to my mind several times while reading Calculating God. Sawyer’s book is foremost a piece of entertainment and should be treated as such. On this count, it is not a bad read, and maybe even deserved the Hugo nomination it received. Nonetheless, Calculating God presents an abundance of philosophical annoyances.[1] Calculating God follows a Canadian paleontologist, Thomas Jericho, as he is contacted by an […]
The internets are trying to kill me with frustration. I simply seek intellectual camaraderie and this is what I get on a LibraryThing thread concerning the Continental/Analytic divide in philosophy: In my ever so humble opinion, so-called analytic philosophy is puerile trash. Real philosophy is in the work of the continental writers and thinkers – it confronts questions that affect us everyday, all the time, instead of burrowing into some self-aggrandizing, pseudo-scientific cocoon of trite figures and games and childish conclusions. It depresses me that all this trivia is called “philosophy” in the Anglo-American West, and that it’s used to […]
A follow-up to my previous post on this frustrating exchange. Here is my final post with Gkochanowsky’s embedded replies. Your characterization of philosophy is ridiculous (again a straw man argument). Do you forget that the origin of some of our sciences is in philosophy? Adam Smith, father of modern economics, philosopher; Gottfried Leibniz, co-creator of the calculus, philosopher; William James, pioneering psychologist, philosopher; Bertrand Russell, great logician aiding in the production of a logical foundation for mathematics and much more (paving the road for computer science), philosopher, etc. I anticipate that you will say that their contributions are science and […]
Bob “The Maximum Leader” Meyer‘s manifesto of the “Logicians Liberation League”, recently quoted by Branden Fitelson in the context of promoting formal epistemology: Do not be deceived, Establishment pigs (this means you too, Establishment dogs). The subservience of past generations of logicians does not mean that we shall bear forever our treatment as animals (you barnyard fowl). We are human beings (you swine). You are living in a day when logicians will not any longer endure your taunts, your slurs, your insults (you filthy vermin). In the name of A. N. Whitehead and B. Russell we gather; in the spirit […]
While researching a bit on android epistemology for a wikipedia post, I came upon a reference to The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow” (NYT Review): Jennifer Marcus, an agoraphobic 22-year-old genius with obsessive-compulsive disorder who was raised in Southern California but born in China. Since she can’t bring herself to step outside her door, let alone work through the bureaucratic red tape of an adoption agency, she decides to build a robot out of obsolete missiles, name it “Jenny Chow,” and send it on a journey to find her mother. Interestingly, the playwright of Rolin Jones happened upon the seminal […]