Arbitrary Marks

Now that I have the schedule for the Methodology Conference, I can direct my reading more carefully (no sense in reading Saturday’s articles first, then scrambling to prep for Tuesday’s workshop).
The first day includes Roy Sorenson and Josh Dever, and I’m taking a break from packing for Austin to read Sorenson’s paper on interestingness.* One [...]

My friend Dru sent me this link which contains a summary of Alvin Plantinga’s argument against evolutionary naturalism. It’s an interesting proposal, one which I think has some connections to the earlier discussion here about radical translation.
The post at per Caritatem looks to be taken from a recent lecture (the author, Cynthia Nielson is a graduate student [...]

Class is out for the summer–I passed both of my education courses and passed the students in my philosophy class–and now it’s time to dive into the reading for the UT Austin Philosophy Methodology Conference. There’s quite a bit of it, and I’m already forming some questions specific to Buddhist philosophy, which hopefully I can [...]

In my last post, I asked a roughly formed question about connecting experience and ontological claims. I recognize that many of these posts need to be more carefully exposited in light of actual Buddhist texts and specific traditions–but while I’m in a bit of a summer holding pattern and reading mostly Western analytic philosophy, I [...]

Nāgārjuna in the Vigrahavyāvartanī is responding, as I’ve noted, to critics of his view of emptiness (also translated as “void”). The way that this particular prose work is structured involves twenty verses from his opponents–the last post was a translation of Verse 1–and thirty verses of Nāgārjuna responding.

“If an intrinsic nature of the things, whatever they may be, exists nowhere, your statement must be devoid of an intrinsic nature. It is not, therefore, in a position to deny the intrinsic nature [of the things].” - Translation by Bhattacharya

This is the opening charge, quoted by Nāgārjuna in the Vigrahavyāvartanī.

How do you distinguish the gender of these two individuals on the cover of April’s J Crew catalog? What visual cues differentiate “masculine” and “feminine”, despite the similar dress style (tie, khakis, blue shirt, etc)?
In 1978, Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna wrote a book, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach that attempted to answer this [...]

I don’t usually do this–blatantly link to my own comments on a post–but I don’t have time right now to delve more into this, so I thought I’d send some of you over to Common Grounds to read. Esther Meek was my philosophy prof at Covenant Seminary. Although we don’t see eye to eye on [...]

I’ve been dipping into a relatively recent book published by OUP called Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind. During my master’s degree, I took a class on phenomenology at Saint Louis University–it was one of the most difficult mind-benders of a course in my time at UMSL. We read Husserl as well as Brandon. Tough [...]

I’m thankful for my readers because they are often able to point at particular tensions in my thought that I’m aware of, subtly, but that require more propositional attention. Dru’s comment about happiness is one instance of this.

While teaching at the Newberry Library, I’ve been reading Wayne Proudfoot’s Religious Experience. One of the central questions about descriptions of so-called “mystical experience” (so-called because to categorize it begs numerous questions) is whether there is a raw, undifferentiated, phenomenal content to the experience. The basic picture is of having a single experience, in many people, times and cultural contexts, which then gets interpreted through a grid: