Mindmatter

bbcity said: He led a campaign to get Cambridge to revoke Derrida’s honorary PhD

So wikipedia tells me.. I highly doubt any department saw this and thought “Wow how profound. He had that whole two dogmas thing but THIS! WOW!” but whatever. I get that arguing is sometimes just fun for argument’s sake. Maybe I come to tumblr mainly for the cats and shit. I go to school for the arguing. As I’m sure you can attest, your IRL peers are better philosophers than most people on tumblr. Yes?

edit: *present company excluded

I don’t know the specifics here, but from what I know most of his early work was on formal logic and set theory. I very much doubt his appointment as junior fellow at harvard and subsequent appointments elsewhere where in anyway due to his criticism of PS. I’d never heard that Quine wrote on the subject until right now. I take it to be the case that his critique of the post-structuralism movement is not considered an important aspect of his work. Nothing I’ve ever read or heard about him has even mentioned it explicitly. 

1. I wrote a dissertation proving some libertarians on the internet are stupid and got so many job offers. 

2. I wrote a dissertation proving people who believe in god are stupid and got so many job offers.

3. I wrote a dissertation proving post-modernism is incoherent and got so many job offers.

I’m working on three papers over Thanksgiving break. The first is on Anscombe, group intentions, military psychology and Harry S. Truman. I have most of that argument figured out. The second paper I’m working on is about speech perception. I have no argument, aside from a vague intuition that perception is not ‘theory laden’ and so the auditory perception of speech does not include the perception of meaning. That is to say, we don’t hear meaning, strictly speaking. I want to engage with the literature on meaning and speech perception, but I’m not that familiar with it yet. I’ve been trolling PhilPapers looking for a fight basically. I want this to be the start of something substantial that I can one day turn into a writing sample for applications to PhD programs. The third paper is another commentary on John Heil’s forthcoming book on metaphysics. Haven’t started looking at the chapter I’ve been assigned to write about, but it’s on thought and language. I’ll know more about that once I dig in. Feel free to chime in here with ideas or suggestions on stuff to read, or ask follow up questions about any of this. I’d be much obliged. 

1. Ayn Rand
2. Debating God’s existence

Stop being boring.

New Keith Jarrett album is just what I need tonight.