One of our species’ signature capacities, Deacon argues, is symbol-usage. Symbols permeate our practices to such an extent that even our success in mating depends on our acquiring complex social skills for negotiating symbolically mediated transactions. “Thus,” he avers, “because of symbols and with the aid of symbols, Homo sapiens has been self-domesticated and adapted to a niche unlike any other that ever has existed. We have been made in the image of the word.”

In recent years, though, advances in cognitive science have made it ... Boroditsky researches cognitive science and symbolic systems - thought and language. ...

The zombie argument for dualism is commonly misunderstood. [For a broad overview and assessment of the argument, see my 'Zombie Review'.] In particular, misunderstanding the precise role conceivability plays in the argument often leads to overly hasty dismissals. In this post, I want to set out and correct three such misunderstandings. Let me begin on a conciliatory note by emphasizing that many conceivability arguments are no good.

Since it came up in the comments on the previous post, what about language requirements? My own view is that they're useless in Philosophy as a departmental requirement. To explain: students working on dissertations on, say, Aristotle, certainly need to acquire a serious command of Greek, whereas students working on, say, deflationism probably have no use for any foreign language at all (they'd be better off learning more logic). So students working on dissertations in areas which require work in foreign languages should be required to acquire them at the level appropriate for their work.

"A lot of philosophy of science is interested in parceling apart the language of science and saying 'Well, this is what you guys are talking about when ...

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There is, I think, something of a standard history of 20th Century English-speaking philosophy, at least through 1980. The broad outlines are fairly familiar.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming.
Main authors discussed: Alfred Tarski, Kirk Ludwig, Matti Eklund
Douglas Patterson argues that the best way to respond to the semantic paradoxes that arise in natural language is to take natural language semantics to be (explosively) inconsistent. According…Berit Brogaard