What that’s about: 38 years ago today, Johnny Cash recorded his classic live album.
Bill Vallicella addresses the question “What good is philosophy?”, and gets in a well-aimed lick in the bargain:
It is good in that it conduces to intellectual humility, to an appreciation of our actual predicament in this life, which is one of profound ignorance concerning what would be most worth knowing if we could know it. The aporetic philosopher is a Socratic philosopher, one who knows what he knows and knows what he does not know. His is the docta ignorantia, the learned ignorance. The aporetic philosopher is a debunker of epistemic pretense. One sort of epistemic pretense is that of the positive scientists who, succumbing to the temptation to wax philosophical, overstep the bounds of their competence, proposing bogus solutions to philosophical problems, and making incoherent assertions. A good recent example would be Richard Dawkins with his nonsensical talk of “selfish genes.” (Debunked by David Stove in “Genetic Calvinism or Demons and Dawkins” in Darwinian Fairytales, Ashgate, 1995, pp. 118-136)
The NYT gets it wrong again:
Momofuku Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka, at 96, was looking for cheap, decent food for the working class when he invented ramen noodles all by himself in 1958.
“Invented”???? They’ve been around for centuries. Fortunately, not all Western journalists are as clueless. Looks like it takes the Europeans (Reuters) to get the facts straight:
[Ando] was inspired to develop the world’s first instant noodle product after coming across a long line of people waiting to buy fresh “ramen” noodles from a black market stall during the food shortages after World War Two, Japanese media said.
But it takes a blogger to really understand why the story’s important:
With all due respect, it’s tragic that many non-Japanese know of ramen only as a salty freeze-dried noodle thing that is typically served in a styrofoam cup. A bowl of real ramen, however, is a delicious and subtle work of art which bears little resemblance to its instant counterpart (as the superb 1985 film Tampopo amply demonstrated).
For Austinites, I recommend the ramen at Origami Express at 2438 W Anderson Lane (across the street from the Walmart-to-be.)
David Chalmers has a new paper called “Ontological Anti-Realism” online. He starts by mapping the territory:
The basic question of ontology is “What exists?” The basic question of metaontology is: are there objective answers to the basic question of ontology? Here ontological realists say yes, and ontological antirealists say no.
…
An intermediate sort of lightweight realism has also developed, holding that while there are objective answers to ontological questions, these answers are somehow shallow or trivial, perhaps reflecting the structure of our concepts rather than the furniture of the world….These views contrast with what we might call the heavyweight realism of Fine, Sider, van Inwagen, and others, according to which answers to ontological questions are highly nontrivial, and reflect the ultimate furniture of the world.In the currently thriving field of first-order ontology, the most popular view is heavyweight realism, with the a minority of lightweight realists and antirealists. Outside the field of ontology, deflationary views are widespread, with many non-ontologists being skeptical of the heavyweight realism that has become common in the field.
I haven’t finished reading the paper, but it seems to me that it raises interesting questions when juxtaposed to Bill Vallicella’s post that I linked to above. (My quotation, by the way, distorts Bill’s intention in the interest of being cute. He’s actually defending a particular conception of philosophy: that all important philosophical questions are aporetic.) It makes one wonder where Bill’s position falls on Chalmers’ realism-antirealism continuum. From what I’ve read of his work, he argues strenously for heavyweight realist positions; I’m not quite sure how to reconcile that with his defense of aporetic philosophy.
Correction Department: I actually got this post uploaded at one minute after midnight. Therefore, my initial statement is erroneous. He recorded it 38 years ago yesterday.
Post a Comment