theorywatch

Every time I look at this title, I giggle. Take that, David Hume!

Luciano Floridi writes in his “Against Digital Ontology” (Synthese, 2009): “Konrad Zuse is acknowledged by many as the father of digital ontology.” Zuse apparently also built the first digital computer, in Nazi Germany, even before ENIAC.

Thank heavens I’m untenured. Otherwise I’d feel even more ignorant than I do right now, not having known any of this.

How I love this story about Edmund Gettier’s tenure case. (But since its source is Wikipedia, I’m still dubious as to whether I actually possess any knowledge here….)

Well, no, not really, but Principia Comica is certainly one of them, possibly because I can’t decide how to categorize it as a collection. It could be considered a digital library of philosophical comics… or an archive of the work of these two authors…. or a learning repository of philosophical ideas…. or something completely outside of these boxes. On the other hand, the preference I have for this does tend to define me. Heh.

As it happens, I’ve been reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s latest book this summer. It’s what you might call an uncomfortable read: not exactly what you’d call beach reading (not that I have been doing anything that goes anywhere near a beach…. or even a splash pad!) But highly recommended if you want to re-examine your own ongoing “experiments in ethics” in the light of various moral and social psychological theories: in fact, it’s difficult not to.

Hard to believe that Ron Day was ever a “junior” faculty member here at OU, with things like this already on his mind…

as if Smiraglia’s views on instantiation of “the work” weren’t complicated enough…

to wrap my brain around in terms of the possible (though not, I think, probable) future of digital collections.

Ahh, a collection of older versions of popular software that will allow you to downgrade your current (all too often feature-bloated and buggy) version in the interests of efficiency. Clever!

And, speaking of thinking backward to move forward, I recently came across programmer/philosopher Paul Graham’s essay “How to Do Philosophy,” in which he revisits the history and philosophy of academic “theory” from Aristotle on, and offers the more bootstrapping approach of “Of all the useful things we can say, which are the most general?” (but also points out that thinking like that won’t get you tenure.) Heady stuff….

… naturally brings to mind MindPapers, a collection devoted to the philosophy of mind. (Note to self: the “theory theory,” an old favorite of mine in this area, has now apparently crashed and burned within the discipline, though the notion of newborns as “natural-born scientists” continues to entertain me….)

For starters, since we’ve had comps on the brain all week, how about a comprehensive exam question (doctoral level) about theories of truth?

(This is from a collection of philosophy-oriented comics (Principia Comica— now, that’s clever!) that I’ve just come across. Didn’t realize that there was so much epistemological humor out there….)

Apropos of the 5033 seminar: a useful list of resources from the philosophy department at Carnegie Mellon and the Overcoming Bias blog from the philosophy faculty at Oxford. (“Thinker toys”: a phrase that always make me recall Bob Benjamin at Syracuse with great fondness.) How will the availability of this type of tool further promote the commodification of knowledge and/or inform information literacy practices? To be continued by someone… (perhaps with the appropriate argument mapping tool in place!)