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Category Archives: Philosophy
Kant vs. Strauss vs. postmodernism
If you had to choose, would you rather read 300 pages on Kantian nonsense, on Straussian esotericism, or on postmodernist garbage? Our colleague Jason Brennan, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University, wrote up this sarcastic taxonomy of the most common … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Bayesian Reasoning, Philosophy
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Wittgenstein’s door handle
Via Dan Wang’s twitter feed, we unexpectedly stumbled upon this insightful but speculative essay by Christopher Benfey in the N.Y. Review of Books. In summary, Benfey describes the beautiful door handles (pictured below) the philosopher Ludwig Wiggenstein designed for a … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, History, Philosophy
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The law of the law of the law of interpretation?
As we mentioned in our previous blog post, William Baude and Stephen Sach recently posted on SSRN an 85-page magnum opus titled “The Law of Interpretation.” (By the way, on the bottom of each page of their article, there is an … Continue reading
Posted in Law, Logical Fallacies, Philosophy
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The law of the law of interpretation
William Baude (University of Chicago) and Stephen E. Sachs (Duke University) recently posted on SSRN an important paper titled “The Law of Interpretation.” (How important? Their paper will be published in the Harvard Law Review–that important!) Law professors like Baude and … Continue reading
Posted in Law, Logical Fallacies, Philosophy
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Daniel Dennett’s four rules
We recently stumbled upon this short post by Maria Popova (“How to criticize with kindness”) explaining philosopher Daniel Dennett’s “four rules” of fair-minded, scholarly criticism. In brief, before you begin to refute or criticize someone else’s ideas, you should do … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Bayesian Reasoning, Cooperation, Philosophy, Truth
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Is there such a thing as an immoral promise?
Or is an immoral or wicked promise not a real “promise” qua promise at all? In either case, we need to have some reliable method of determining right from wrong, yet most (if not all) theories of promissory obligation fail … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law, Paradoxes, Philosophy
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Indeterminate chess rules
In the course of writing up our paper on “immoral promises,” we searched for and read the essay “Wicked Promises” by J.E.J. Altham, and in the process of obtaining Altham’s essay, we stumbled upon a short paper by Ian Hacking … Continue reading
Posted in Games, Paradoxes, Philosophy, Uncategorized
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Is an immoral promise a paradox or a contradiction?
Have you ever made an “immoral promise,” i.e. have you ever promised to do something wrongful, like tell a lie or steal? (By the way, how does one decide when something is wrongful?) Is such a promise even logically possible; … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Paradoxes, Philosophy, Questions Rarely Asked
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“Immoral Promises”
That is the title of our most recent work in progress, which we posted here on the Social Science Research Network. As the title suggests, the focus of our paper is on illegal and immoral promises, like the ill-fated partnership … Continue reading
Posted in Law, Paradoxes, Philosophy
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Will this presidential promise be kept?
Earlier this year, we wrote up an in-depth series of blog posts discussing the moral bases of “the presidential pledge,” i.e. the solemn pledge all the Republican presidential candidates made to support the eventual nominee of their party. (Here is … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Deception, Law, Philosophy, Politics
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prior probability 