On The Very Idea - A Philosophy Podcast

In this first episode of a two part series on Donald Davidson, I examine the work of this often puzzling yet seminal American philosopher. Davidson offers a seemingly baffingly simple theory of meaning - that 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white. In other words, that above sentence about snow is true if and only if snow is actually white and that fact about the whiteness of snow is the only thing that we need to know about snow if we are too understand the meaning of the sentence 'snow is white'. Isn't that a little too simple of a theory you might ask? Fair question and in this episode, I'll attempt to explain why this theory may be all we need to understand the entirety of what a concept of meaning provides for a language. It's adequate. Maybe ...

In this first episode of a two part installment, I look at the work of David Hume and his ideas that justify that famous quote of his “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” This quote has always troubled me. As politico-moral beings, many don't want to classify a horrific act as merely bad. There is also an urge to classify that horrific act as irrational. Does reason really tell us nothing about morality? Is reason just a way of determining efficient means to an end? Was Hitler evil and rational, or, just evil? What work can a concept of rationality do to condemn an evil act? In this episode, I look at the work of Peter Railton, a Hume scholar, who argues that people often interpret Hume's quote incorrectly. According to Railton, Hume believed that rationality does have a robust role to play in determining which acts are moral or immoral. Hume's point was rather that rationality in isolation could not tell us much about morality but working in conjunction with our sentiments, rationality could help determine for us which acts are moral or immoral. 

In this second installment of a two part series on that loftiest of philosophical questions - ‘what is the meaning of life?’, I will make a flailing attempt to answer the question but, hopefully, it is an attempt that may have certain traction. Through looking at nihlism and the work of British analytic philospher James Tartagila, I will show that even if we live in a nihlistic universe, this recognition of a nihilistic realism isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's not a good thing either. It's a no-thing. Just the lack of an answer to what is the meaning of life. Within this universe (if nihlism is indeed the case), we must create our own meaning - we must be the authors of our own lives. If this sounds difficult, it actually isn't. We humans do it all the time in finding meaning in what we do. We have whole civilizations of people finding meaning through life and its activities whether embedded in a social context or self-authored. And, any account of these people’ lives would amount to empirical third person data that would hold up in any social science. So, the fact of meaningful lives is empirically grounded - a fact both obvious but often forgotten in philosophical discussion.  And, its not living a lie to create your own meaning in a nihlistic universe. It's just living well. In a thoroughly materialist and nihilistic framework, the universe provides the stage for a meaningful life but not the answers.

In this first installment of a two part series, I look at that most deepest of all questions of the philosophical variety, 'what is the meaning of life'? ''What is the meaning of life?' is the very question that witty conversational partners will volley back with when they hear you are studying philosophy ... 'Hey, so what's the meaning of life?'. Despite this converational trope, actual academic philosophy blatantly defies this stereotype by almost never asking broad questions about the meaning of life. We have to meander back to the ancient Greeks to hear schools of philosophy devoted to the rigorous discussion of the topic (OK, the existentialists certainly discussed it too). In this episode, I want to clear the brush and discuss what the meaning of life isn't. The meaning of life isn't a mock-evolutionary call to selfishness of the genetic or material variety or the making of babies that have your nose and hairline. Nor is the meaning of life something that a science like physics could tell us about. And religion had its moment a while ago, but it no longer seems to sustain a viable choice in the meaning of life game. John Stuart Mill provided a very promising answer to what a meaningful life could consist in and we'll examine his ideas. Then, in the next episode, in a fit of modesty, I'lll reveal what the meaning of life is. Perhaps.

All that and more. 

In this third and final installment on WVO Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, I look at Gary Gutting's examination of the paper in his 2009 book What Philosophers Know. Gutting argues that although analytic philosophers pride themselves on the rigor of their argumentation and Two Dogmas is seen as one of the most important papers of 20th century analytic philosophy, Quine offers few actual arguments in favor of rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction. Rather he relies on a sympathetic audience perhaps exhausted with logical positivism to appeal on pragmatic and even somewhat minimalist aesthetic sensibilities to abandon the analytic-synthetic distinction in favor of a behaviorist and radically empirical approach to questions of meaning. Perhaps the analytic-synthetic distinction is not robust enough to do the heavy lifting that the logical positivists require of it, but, it is still a relevant and very clear distinction. Or so argued Gutting.

In this series, I want to look at W.V.O Quine's 1950 essay Two Dogmas of Empiricism which many feel put the final nail in the coffin of the logical positivist project. It's often regarded as the most important or impactful paper of the 20th century. Gary Gutting, formerly of the University of Notre Dame, felt otherwise. We will explore Quine's argument as well as Gutting's case that it wasn't a very well argued piece of philosophical work at all. But, in this first installment of a three part series, we will look at the logical positivist movement that Quine supposedly had stopped dead in its tracks with his Two Dogmas paper. In particular, I will examine the extent to which the logical positivist project hung on the analytic-synthetic distinction. Plus, the usual trivia.