A quick browse of Steve Peters: The Chimp Paradox
In the Space of Reasons
by Unknown
3d ago
Richard I’ve had an enjoyable hour looking at The Chimp Paradox. I hadn’t realised when you said his name that he is that Steve Peters. Here are my quick thoughts. My first question opening the book was why is there a ‘paradox’ and what was it? I think of a paradox as a conceptually baffling phenomenon. Perhaps some issue where we are drawn to two answers, for very strong reasons, but which cannot both be true. I’m not sure that there is any paradox in the book. And I’m not sure he uses the word ‘paradox’ more than twice (I’ve searched), which is odd. I think what he means is that there ar ..read more
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Notes mainly on pp92-4 of Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self
In the Space of Reasons
by Unknown
5M ago
Exegesis I have been trying to understand part of the framework of Charles Taylor’s (1989) Sources of the Self which I first read 20 years ago and filed away for my retirement. Quite how it is possible for a philosopher, in their study, to write about modernity as such is still beyond me but I have more time now to try to catch up.In fact, I’m stuck a bit before the book gets to that bit. Taylor begins by setting out the stalking horse: a broad conception of morality, or a broader category than the category of morality as usually understood, to capture ‘what makes life worth living’. I want ..read more
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The consolations of philosophy of psychiatry: an autoethnography
In the Space of Reasons
by Unknown
10M ago
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it is to offer a kind of autoethnography of a previously disinterested philosopher of psychiatry experiencing a common mental illness – Generalised Anxiety Disorder - and thus turning to philosophy for some sort of self-understanding. Second to assess how well Richard Moran’s account of self-knowledge in Authority and Estrangement illustrates my experience of anxiety (Moran 2007). The conclusion is that if offers a helpful third person account of the mismatch between avowal and reported belief that was the main focus of my symptoms but much less by way ..read more
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Kripke's sceptical solution
In the Space of Reasons
by Tim Thornton
2y ago
I’ve been chatting to Ali HosseinKhani about Kripke and despite his best endeavours, I seem to be in the grip of a confusion about Kripke’s sceptical solution that I’m finding it hard to shake. Here’s another attempt to make it clearer to me. I assume that the dialectic goes something like this. Kripke’s deploys a sceptical argument against an intuitive picture of meaning. His argument aims to cast doubt on what appears, pre-philosophically, to be an everyday ‘metalinguistic’ fact: the fact that one can mean something by a word. He considers the case of meaning addition by the word ‘addition ..read more
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Abstract: On not believing what one says: my own experience of self-avowal in anxiety
In the Space of Reasons
by Tim Thornton
2y ago
As an approximately Wittgensteinian philosopher, I have always subscribed to a ‘grammatical’ orientation in philosophy in which the key idea is to describe the conditions under which word use is normally justified. One feature of this approach is, typically, to favour the public over the private and hence the need to work to find space for the latter in the relatively unproblematic context of the former. Despite this, Wittgenstein’s work also contains discussions of finer grained linguistic phenomenology in which the wish to say something, or the wish to try to say something using certain word ..read more
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Lingering confusions about disjunctivism (perceptual and epistemic)
In the Space of Reasons
by Tim Thornton
2y ago
(Picture credit at end) I attended a virtual workshop given by Charles Travis yesterday in part of which he described favourably John McDowell’s disjunctivism in his ‘Criteria, defeasibility and knowledge’ (McDowell 1982/1998). At the end, he rather resisted getting drawn on McDowell’s later discussions of disjunctivism on the grounds that it was of mixed success. Given their opposed views on whether perception has a content, this was not surprising. But it reminds me of what seems odd in the later discussion in a way that does not turn on McDowell’s content-view. (McDowell’s content ..read more
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On the death of pets
In the Space of Reasons
by Tim Thornton
2y ago
Lois’ cat, Snufkin, is dying. He has a terminal heart condition which may be eased a little with medication but it has only one outcome. (Of course, life has only one outcome which is part of the point of this note.) Having found this out last week, I’m still in that state of shocked sentimental misery which, for me, is made worse by my taking every death of someone or something close to me to represent every death, every permanent leave-taking of someone or something close to me. Later, probably – if there is much of a later – the shock will ease to leave merely the sentimental misery. (I ha ..read more
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Implicit bias: the ‘dark side’ of hinge epistemology?
In the Space of Reasons
by Tim Thornton
2y ago
This entry and the talk to which it refers will be dedicated to the always excellent Sarah Traill whose chairing of a pre-board meeting today permitted me to log off and get on with writing the slides before logging back in. I’m giving a talk next week at the Royal College of Psychiatrists next week on implicit bias called ‘Implicit bias: the ‘dark side’ of hinge epistemology?’ The idea is that bias is the flipside of what has become known as ‘hinge epistemology’. Descartes presents a conception of his own epistemic project in which, once suitably resourced, he sits in his study in his dressin ..read more
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Sydney Smith’s Letter To Lady Georgiana Morpeth
In the Space of Reasons
by Tim Thornton
2y ago
Foston, Feb. 16th, 1820 Dear Lady Georgiana, Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have done—so I feel for you. 1st. Live as well as you dare. 2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75° or 80°. 3rd. Amusing books. 4th. Short views of human life—not further than dinner or tea. 5th. Be as busy as you can. 6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you. 7th. And of those acquaintances who amuse you. 8th. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of the ..read more
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Pickering on family resemblance
In the Space of Reasons
by Tim Thornton
2y ago
There’s a discussion of family resemblance in Neil Pickering’s 2011/12 paper ‘Extending disorder: essentialism, family resemblance and secondary sense’. Given that family resemblance trades on resemblances which are simply likenesses and given Pickering’s critique of the ‘likeness argument’, I’m surprised that he is as positive about family resemblance as an account of illness. It encourages me to rethink the conclusion of his Metaphor of Mental Illness as reinstating likenesses but only via their metaphoric construction. In other words, conditions might indeed count as illnesses via likeness ..read more
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