(Note: As of 7/18/08 Right Reason and The Conservative Philosopher are both defunct.) Right Reason emerged from the tumult of The Conservative Philosopher (TCP), where K. Burgess Jackson disabled comments and alienated some of its members. In contrast to TCP, Right Reason has admirably aspired to give “conservative principles a careful, powerful, philosophical defense” and welcomes “vigorous, reasoned debate.” How does it measure-up? The first philosophical post opened with the following question: is analytic philosophy stealth conservatism? Lydia McGrew notes that some radical egalitarian “continental” philosophers argue that “objective truth, logical rigor, and clarity” are tools of conservatism. McGrew concludes […]
John L. Taylor
177 posts
I am published in ACS Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology (CRPIT) Volume 37 – Computers and Philosophy 2003. Woo-hoo!
Here is an excerpt from a summary of The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed: What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).The problem is that all of these comparative preferences generate competitive consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” in today’s world, does not always mean buying a tract home in the suburbs. It means […]
Welcome to the 6th edition of Tangled Bank. The entries range from evolutionary psychology to immunology; from bellicose birds to bollocks. First, Jon Christensen of Conservation News writes about Enriqueta Velarde’s work with Heermann’s Gulls and Elegant Terns and their relationship to anchovies and spring sardines. Christenson suggests that, indeed, Predicting Fisheries is for the Birds (scroll-down to Wednesday, June 16, 2004 entry). Next, can our Pleistocene minds explain the failure of students (contra Piaget) to achieve formal operational abilities such as prepositional logic, inductive logic, hypothesis testing, and reasoning about proportions, combinations, probabilities, and correlations? Jeremy E. C. Genovese […]
I am by no means religious, quite the contrary, but my relatively mild-mannered disbelief pales next to her allergic reaction to all things religious. My wife once yelled at a proselytizer handing-out pamphlets at a Faire. The woman must have thought Dani was possessed, because she jumped and ran. Recently, we have been coming home to pamphlets stuck in our door. Dani does not like this, so she offered a response that we now have posted on our door: What will the neighbors think…
The New York Review of Books features Freeman J. Dyson’s review of Debunked!. Here is a particularly interesting excerpt: The book also has a good chapter on “Amazing Coincidences.” These are strange events which appear to give evidence of supernatural influences operating in everyday life. They are not the result of deliberate fraud or trickery, but only of the laws of probability. The paradoxical feature of the laws of probability is that they make unlikely events happen unexpectedly often. A simple way to state the paradox is Littlewood’s Law of Miracles. Littlewood was a famous mathematician who was teaching at […]