Cogito Ergo Blog

• The Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and History From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1 day old)

  The rethinking of Marxism undertaken by the Frankfurt school in the 1920s and 1930s made history one of its central themes. Early works by Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Lukacs all dealt with history in one… more

• Final Comparison! From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (12 days old)

  1 . Nothing is, of course, absolutely independent of anything else. I am powerfully attracted by the Hegelian view of the circle as the best metaphor for the ‘shape’ of the overall ‘structure’ of thou… more

• Further Comparison From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (12 days old)

  I am quite sure you are right about the necessity for deep immersion in a tradition in order to truly master it, and one should always realize that even mastery is always incomplete; learning is neve… more

• Yet More Comparison From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (12 days old)

  I am afraid that interpret me as claiming that I have reached an Archimedean point, as you put it, does not take account of either the historicity I am repeatedly stressing in my perspective or the ev… more

• Back To Comparison From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (12 days old)

  I am not asking you to agree that there is one way of ‘parsing’ reality that is universally generalizable. This is for at least two reasons. First, there is no ‘reality’ independent of the parsing of … more

• Dramatic Selfhood From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (15 days old)

  From another conversation... "As I would put it, there is no essence to the self. At any point one has a certain amount of raw material as given - gender, height, strength, intelligence, language, … more

• The Place Of A Comparative Politics From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (18 days old)

  This was a reply to a conversation with a colleague: "The essence of comparison is that two things must be in some respect similar, if only in respect of their being things. Otherwise comparison is… more

• Violence From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (33 days old)

  What is the extension of the concept of violence? That is, does violence come in different forms? For example, people often talk in a political context of colonialism and imperialism as forms of viole… more

• Three Ideas of Nature From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (89 days old)

  In Western thought, it is often observed, the idea of nature has played a role that has been both fundamental and ever-changing. Three main stages in its development can perhaps be retrospectively ide… more

• The Creation of the World, or Globalization From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (202 days old)

  The title of Nancy’s Globalization or the Creation of the World, as the author’s Preface makes clear, is intentionally ambiguous; the terms can represent an alternative, or be treated as synonymous. I… more

• We Have Never Been Modern From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (270 days old)

  Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern is an analysis of the concept of ‘modernity’ that rightly identifies it as a historic phenomenon characterized by an insistence on the absolute nature of several rel… more

• The Story of Man From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (672 days old)

  Cyril Aydon, author of a biography on Darwin, has now produced An Introduction to 150,000 years of human history. It is a work of synthesis, inevitably; it is questionable how one could even do 'resea… more

• Our Knowledge of the Past From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (820 days old)

  Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past (Cambridge: CUP, 2004) Tucker provides a welcome and robust rejection of scepticism about historical knowledge, and is moreover correct in thinking that a well-fou… more

• Four important ordinary concepts From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (937 days old)

  i) Reflection. The experience of seeing oneself in a mirror; it's fascination. The first-person and third-person view. Reflexivity of self consciousness and its infinite character. ii) Mapping. Rea… more

• Why Prehistory? From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (985 days old)

  One theme is a scrutiny of the history of ideas for the first points at which distinctions between forms of thought were first articulated, and then the point at which they became recognized, and then… more

• Phantoms in the Brain From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (991 days old)

  Philosophy of mind used to be a largely speculative business, or at any rate, its only empirical basis was in the phenomenological scrutiny of the effects of mind itself. Modern neuroscience is changi… more

• A note on the history of philosophy in Russia From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1028 days old)

  Based on no more than half an hour's perusal of some textbooks in the philosophy section of a bookshop in Moscow, I have the following observations. Since the collapse of the USSR, the curriculum has … more

• A Note on Plato and Hobbes From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1074 days old)

  Although Hobbes is rightly associated with the early modern scientific revolution, and the repudiation of scholastic thought, there are certain significant parallels between his view of the divisions … more

• Yet another restatement of the theme From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1079 days old)

  This one comes from trying to sum it all up for a research statement for a job application: "A theme that emerged from my work on Oakeshott was the identification of the different categories of tho… more

• Why Is A "Category Mistake" A Problematic Concept? From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1112 days old)

  In the following I try and explain where I think the difficulties in the idea of a category mistake (which are more to do with the notion of a category than the notion of a mistake) arise. In The Conc… more

• More on Category Mistakes From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1113 days old)

  Wikipedia, I have discovered, has the following entry for category mistake, which attributes the phrase to Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind: 'A category mistake, or category error is a semantic or… more

• Category Mistakes in Criticism of Greek Philosophy From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1114 days old)

  It may be helpful to keep a record of the contexts in which the idea of a category mistake occurs. Here is another. The moral philosopher Bernard Williams writes: 'Aristotle famously said (EN 1096b… more

• Recognition of Category Mistakes in Public Discourse From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1116 days old)

  From Review, Saturday Guardian, 21.10.2006: Steven Poole, Review of Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams, The View from the Centre of the Universe. Poole writes 'isn't talk of the "meaning" of the univ… more

• Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the forms of thought From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1411 days old)

  In Kant we find an acknowledgment of a number of different disciplines or forms of thought. For example, he refers to domains such as ordinary consciousness, logic, mathematics, physics, and psycholog… more

• Descartes, Method, and Forms of Knowledge From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1416 days old)

  Descartes’ work is a natural starting place for anyone interested in the history of forms of knowledge in the modern world, because he conceived of himself as beginning afresh in his consideration of … more

• Ideas From Fire To Freud - Continued From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1428 days old)

  [Apparently there is a size limit of around 10,000 words on individual posts. What follows is a continuation of the previous post, my notes on Watson's 'Ideas From Fire To Freud'] In India during … more

• Ideas From Fire To Freud From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1453 days old)

  Peter Watson's Ideas: A History From Fire To Freud is surely one of the most ambitious works of synthesis ever written. It aims to be a truly global history of ideas, covering not only the West, as fo… more

• Kuhnian Paradigms From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1476 days old)

  One of the most influential works in history and philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century was Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', first published in 1962 … more

• Hegel's Philosophy of Nature From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1486 days old)

  Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature The title of a work by R. Wahsner, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Naturphilosophie: uber ihren Sinn im Lichte der leutigen Naturkenntnis , Frankfurt, 1996, goes straight to … more

• categories and world-views From luke in Cogito Ergo Blog (1510 days old)

  It seems to be the case that any given system of categories is inevitably associated with a certain world-view. E.g. in the way that Plato's metaphor of the divided line implies a world in which there… more

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