My list is short on literature, visual art, music, women and many other areas I’m not up on. Feel free to amend it, as I extend it when more names occur to me.
Dude I feel honored that I’ve actually met someone from your list. I work with some people who have written/edited some books with Dennett. I met him twice, both times I was totally stoned.
One philosopher that I’ve recently started reading is Simon Blackburn, he can actually write, and his Quasi-Realism is a genuinely interesting meta-ethical theory. Plus he seems to agree with Hume about everything, an attitude I support.
That’s too much Scott. Did you get into an argument? I’d love to meet Dennett. You’d love his last 3 books, especially “Freedom Evolves”. It’s philosophy that inspires like a self-empowerment or self-help book. And he explains natural selection (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) in a much more readable way that Dawkins, who I find laborious to read at times.
Quasi-Realism is great because you get to talk about moral truths, say no to relativism, say some attitudes are better than others etc without having to say that moral properties actually exist ‘out there’ in the world. Basically Emotivism without all the drawbacks.
i find this amusing. steven hawking spends a fair amount of time hanging around cambridge (i saw him recently) and simon blackburn, who, by the way is an absolute legend, lectured me on Hume in my first term here back in october for 8 lectures and the theory of knowledge in lent term for 8 lectures. he’s awesome and a great lecturer. if you google him he’s got a website where he puts up all his lecture notes and some other stuff which may be of interest to you if you like him.
sara
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No idea what there is on the net, I’ve just recently done a course which included him at uni. He has lots of books, the ones I’ve looked at are Spreading the Word (really about philosophy of language, but with a section on ethics), Essays in Quasi-Realism and Ruling Passions. I’d imagine if you had a look you could find articles online. He does the popularising philosophy thing as well, no idea if those books are any good, I’m really talking about his own theories here.
For anyone that is interested, Quasi-Realism is basically the view that moral judgements aren’t descriptive of features of the world, rather they express attitudes, but rather than taking a standard expressivist line we allow talk of moral truth (what this exactly is for Blackburn depends upon what you read, he starts out with a true moral statement being a member of some completely consistent attitude set, then moves towards saying ‘p is true’ being just equivalent to asserting p with greater emphasis) as well as denying relativism - my moral opinion that women should be educated is superior to a view that they shouldn’t. The disagreement between the 2 viewpoints is at the level of 1st-order ethical commitments i.e. we disagree about a substantive ethical matter, but just because all we have is a clash of attitudes doesn’t stop my attitude being better. What is wrong with the alternative attitude is that it is ignorant of the potential of women, it is based upon prejudice etc. As Blackburn himself says, all of this is to ‘talk in our voice’, but as long as our voice isn’t a voice to be embarassed by this is no problem.
I admitted I’m short on many fields. I do put more stock in critical, analytical genius with explanatory power and appeal to the left side of my brain, which is usually the more active. The appeal of postmodernism escapes me. It seems to deny meaning, knowledge and progress. It has a streak of paranoia running through it, asserting claims to truth and progress are tactics of political domination and authentic experience and communication are impossible. I’m not interested in this line of weird thinking, just because it sounds original.