Monday, July 01, 2013

Notes and Links

* Tolkien, Blunden, and the Great War at "Philosophy, lit, etc."

* Whale-horses and morses: Tolkien and the Walrus in the OED

* Talking philosophically with children about dessert

* Eric Schliesser on philosophy and poetry (using Wallace Stevens as an example) at "NewAPPS"

* Medieval pet names

* Steven Nadler on Spinoza and Descartes

* What did wine taste like before modern wine techniques? Even in the modern age, the task of the wine taster, in distinguishing wines by category, has become increasingly difficult, not always because the wines are better (although they often are) but because consistency in making them has massively improved, thus making for much less variation.

* Tristan Haze on the Or-to-If Argument for implications being material conditionals. I've always been baffled by the argument, since it does not, in fact, derive the implication from the disjunction but from the structure of a complete disjunctive syllogism, or, in other words, not from the disjunction but from the conjunction of the disjunction with its eliminative disjunct -- all it could possibly establish is that the conditional is at least not stronger than the combination of the disjunction plus an eliminative premise, given disjunctive syllogism. Focusing on the conditional proof aspect is an interesting move.