Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. “Arguably, in contemporary English, the distinction between ‘causally explain’ and ‘account for’ maps onto the Aristotelian distinction between efficient-causal and formal-causal explanations.&#8…

“I don’t find the American Revolution a particularly glorious event” Think of it as an intifada. Which is largely what it was at the beginning, before it got hijacked by the high rollers. LikeLike

I agree; there are two senses to “explain.” But I couldn’t think of a snappy way of rejecting both in two separate formulations, so I used a single ambiguous formulation and a set of examples to do it. My point is that nations are not explananda in eit…

The word “explain” is ambiguous. It can mean “cause,” as in “The recent lightning strikes explain the forest fire”; or it can mean “give an account of,” as in “The scientist’s theory explains…

[…] teacher John Dufford, who first introduced me to Emerson and Thoreau, and to my history teacher, Frederick Fayen, one of the quiet patrons behind the Inness exhibit at the Montclair Art […] LikeLike