Friday, March 14, 2014

Notable Links

* Graham Ware discusses chains of violence in I and II Samuel.

* John Baez on how to find and solve problems.

* Mark Edwards on Origen at the SEP. It's a bit more florid than one would expect from an article in the SEP, but in substance it looks quite good.

* John Kaag on coming across the library of William Earnest Hocking.

* Two posts on Jonathan Edwards's analysis of freedom and necessity at "Analytic Theology, etc.":

Myth Busters: 'Jonathan Edwards Committed a Modal Fallacy'
Jonathan Edwards and Necessity

* Frederick Wertz, Qualitative Inquiry in the History of Psychology (PDF)
Blaine Fowers, Placing Virtue and the Human Good in Psychology (PDF)

* Catarina Dutilh Novaes, A Plea for Descriptive Metaphilosophy as Philosophy. The paper she mentions in the post, on the different ways in which logic has been said to be formal, is a very good one, extremely useful for a number of philosophical projects (clarifying the relation of informal logic to formal logic, for instance, to take just one extremely obvious example, but there are many other obvious possibilities that spring to mind on any reading of the paper, related to questions in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and conceptual analysis) and the referee who suggested that it was of "no real philosophical value" is -- to be quite frank -- an idiot who is a disgrace to the profession.

But it is par for the course. Historians of philosophy tend to be (relatively) irenic on this particular point and just shrug off the denseness of colleagues who have difficulty grasping that history of philosophy is an approach to philosophy and not a subfield of the academic discipline of history, but it gets increasingly tiresome, particularly since HoP is in practice the major organizing principle of philosophy as a profession: structuring undergraduate curricula, establishing vocabularies so that philosophers from very different backgrounds can interact, supplying new concepts and arguments.

* Scott Stroud, Analogical Thinking and Aesthetic Response: Emergent Images of the Philosopher in the Analects and the Apology (PDF)