Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Radgeekdotcom, I don’t have a problem with your breakdown. I was just trying to keep it simple, as a treatise such as yours, while accurate, will put most of the public into a coma. I agree with Bookchin that the historic origin (going back to pre-hist…

Someone looking at my work might think that (politics definitely aside) I seem plausibly like a Cornell product: moral realist, plus a broadly Irwinian approach to ancient philosophy. But I was a moral realist with a broadly Irwinian approach to anci…

Not meaning to ignore anyone–just can’t get back to this until discussion until later this week or over the weekend. LikeLike

So, some scholars think that there are lots of contradictory claims in, say, Plato’s thought on the relationship between virtue and pleasure. (Say, e.g., an apparent conflict on this point between the view suggested by Socrates’s line of q…

(* I say “in the modern world” here not because ancient or medieval warfare was any more likely to be motivated by a just cause, but because the element of outright pillage was much more likely to be openly acknowledged rather than dissembl…

So, I certainly agree, very strongly, that wars are never justified by the lofty motives that propagandists trot out. And also that wars, especially wars in the modern world,* are inevitably better explained by ignoring most of the nominal justificatio…

Another head-scratcher from Jason Brennan’s BHL piece on meta-philosophy (timestamp: 10:16 am, February 12, 2020): Second, what people believe tends to depend a great deal on who their advisors were. People who go to Harvard tend to come out Kantians of some sort. People who go to Arizona tend to come out Gaussian contractualists or…