My friend and comrade Jonathan Birch has gifted me with another guest post. The first of his, which I also enjoyed, can be found here . I ...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
For most of my life I have lived in the UK, but for six years I lived in the United States of America. Somewhat erratic and unpleasant political fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic have me thinking about the differing social models in the two countries, and I am just going to collate some of my impressions here. I will be appealing to various facts and figures but also just my own impressionistic sense of things. The big picture view is that I think that in some ways the USA is in a worse ...| The Sooty Empiric
Josh Habgood-Coote recently asked on BlueSky if there's any way of finding the most cited articles in philosophy overall. He noted that a recent informative Weatherson post, who was looking at a slightly different thing - citation networks within philosophy journals. What Habgood-Coote ended up doing was extracting the ten most cited papers from the 2019-2023 period using google scholar, and linked them here. Using my blog to brag a bit, I am happy to see Vindicating Methodological Triangu...| The Sooty Empiric
I recently read and enjoyed this dialogue on philosophy grad school and why we have it by Barry Lam . While I enjoyed it and learned from ...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
In recent times my online sphere has had a fair few people make the claim that, in some sense, the culture has moved on from Woke. The d...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
For most of my life I have lived in the UK, but for six years I lived in the United States of America. Somewhat erratic and unpleasant polit...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
Josh Habgood-Coote recently asked on BlueSky if there's any way of finding the most cited articles in philosophy overall. He noted that a r...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
Back when I was in grad school I kept a previous blog that I ended up replacing with this one. The other day I wanted to share Reichenbach's...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
Here's a dynamic that I think shapes a lot of politics in the West right now, though I am going to focus on here in the UK. I think this dyn...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
This is another in the series of "things I often find myself saying so I want there to just be one blog I can point to rather than repeat my...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
Hamlet - | The Sooty Empiric
Today's post is a bit of a ramble on a topic that I often think about yet have no firm opinion regarding. The issue is the tendency to treat...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
I have been somewhat pessimistic about analytic philosophy (including my own specifically ) on this blog. While I have hosted other voi...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
Some time back there was some hubbub about an APA blog post piece posing the question " Should we continue to read and honour immoral philos...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
A conversation with a colleague the other day prompts me to explain in more detail why I think myself and most of those like me are wasting our lives. I have already explained that I think analytic philosophy is a degenerative research programme building shoddy structures from inadequate material. But the sunny optimism of Daniel Stoljar's engaging book has given me the tools to explain in somewhat more detail where exactly my worries lie.| The Sooty Empiric
Recently I read this post -- "Behavioural Science Needs to Return to the Basics" -- and I didn't like it. In this blog post I am going to complain about it. To be clear my complaints are not going to dispute that there are lots of tiresome prigs in academia, that given the general demeanour of academics tiresome moralists tend to be of the liberal left variety, and even less that in work (both ideological and not) there is a lot of slapdash reasoning. All of those claims are certainly true, a...| The Sooty Empiric
For a while now I have been unable (unwilling is what I should say, but from the inside it feels stronger than that) to really commit to doing philosophy research. (I have stuff from before this in the pipeline so it might not be obvious from the outside that I have not been doing new work, but to those who know me this is not news.) The basic issue is that I do not think my work is good or interesting. I have posted about this briefly before but there was an important difference between then...| The Sooty Empiric
So I decided to rank the races. In particular, I wanted to see just how many more white philosophers there are on the list of the 376 Most C...| sootyempiric.blogspot.com
This is literally happening right now at universities across the world. Exactly this.| The Sooty Empiric
The American educational system teaches children to distinguish between "facts" and "opinions". A recent paper in Misinformation Review has even made mastery of this distinction a marker of civic political competence. Per this paper facts are those statements that "can be proved or disproved with objective evidence" whereas opinions are those statements that "depend on personal values and preferences". I think this is a bogus distinction and should not have any role as a marker of political ...| The Sooty Empiric
Starting the year off right with a reactionary screed.| The Sooty Empiric
A recent Matt Yglesias post contained some discussion of concerns people have about the contemporary humanities. For those not subscribed he included a screenshot of the discussion in a recent tweet. The basic idea is that there are some core values underlying American society (the context from which he writes, but I think we can fairly generalise this to at least other liberal democracies) and that people expect educated people to be inculcated into these values. By way of example he mentio...| The Sooty Empiric
I wrote a piece before explaining why I do not endorse liberal politics or philosophy. One thing that came out of that was lots of people requesting I say something more positive. If I am not a liberal then what am I? Well I think the answer is Marxist, so I will take some time here to explain what I mean by that. Initially I thought this would also involve arguments for my view but this is already far too long. So as it stands I will just spell out the sort of things I agree to in virtue of ...| The Sooty Empiric
One thing that is supposed to be distinctive of analytic philosophy is the dedication to providing rigorous argumentation in favour of clearly stated theses. Arguments here being understood as articulated premises whose joint plausibility, and demonstrated logical relationship to the conclusion, significantly raises the plausibility of that conclusion -- ideally deductively entailing it. Let's set aside how distinctive this ideal really is (surely some scholastic and Nyāya philosophers would...| The Sooty Empiric
The last thing Condorcet wrote was a long book, entitled Outlines of an historical view of the progress of the human mind. It was published in 1795 and was for a while the most influential thing Condorcet produced (I think nowadays his probabilistic studies of democratic reasoning probably came to overshadow this). It expresses a remarkable optimism about the pattern and inevitability of human progress - an optimism no wise belied by the fact that shortly after its completion Condorcet was ar...| The Sooty Empiric
My friend and comrade Jonathan Birch has gifted me with a guest post. I think of it as a kind of belated spiritual sequel to my own musings on the existential status of our profession here. It's a great read, so without further ado over to Birch!| The Sooty Empiric
Here's a little story I tell myself, of very dubious relationship to actual history but through which I understand myself and my own time in philosophy. It's related to the habit (no doubt grounded in some real similarities) people have of describing analytic philosophy as a basically scholastic enterprise. Now, people do not generally mean this as a positive but rather to suggest that analytic philosophy has become (or maybe was from its inception) an exercise in debate for debate's sake, or...| The Sooty Empiric