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In my limited reading of Kant I feel somewhat stumped by his apparently reductive individualism. Kant is extremely sensitive to social issues on many matters, and he was writing at a time when Smith …

Can anyone recommend some not-overly-technical books dealing with Von Neumann Universal Constructors and similar minimalist replicating "machines" from a general philosophical or even socio-cultural p …

I am really only asking if a concept of "direct knowledge transfer" or perhaps "downloads" exists as a point of discussion or study in philosophy and cognitive sciences. In information theory, we ha …

I read in my Hegel Dictionary that Schelling also discusses a version of the "bad infinity" and gives as an example the repayment of debt by issuing more debt at the Bank of England. I just thought th …

Kant's ding-an-sich or noumena were roundly criticized by Fichte, Hegel, and other near contemporaries as incomprehensible, meaningless, or at least very unsatisfactory. How can we "know" or talk abou …

The concept of "light" described by modern physics seems, to me at least, an incomprehensible bundle of properties: a "universal constant," the "maximum speed," a "wave-particle" phenomenon, the invis …

There seem to be many works on "Philosophy and..." this or that popular TV show; philosophical takes on the ethical contents of tv shows; and works on television in critical theory, pop culture, and m …

I have not really pursued the history or literature on either one of these topics, though the two concepts are often encountered in readings. I have always vaguely taken the "Other" to emerge post-Ka …

Surprisingly, I have not yet found a good philosophical work on the concept of "measuring" things. Though I assume one exists. In quantum theory, of course, we encounter measurement problems, and si …

Apart from Reflections on Violence, I am unfamiliar with Georges Sorel's writings, and I have done only very limited reading on Bergson and Bergsonianism. I understand that Bergson is among the main i …

I may need to refine this question, since I am mostly grappling with a murky intuition and haven't yet done the real work. When I encounter many of the well-known paradoxes, such as Zeno's dichotomy, …

The literature in analytical philosophy is vast and often quite technical. It is not generally dominated by such "Continental" masterworks as Critique of Pure Reason, Phenomenology or Spirit, or Being …

In "Reference and Meaning" Putnam mentions, as an aside, that language requires a certain "division of linguistic labor" that has not been previously recognized. By this, as I take it, he simply mean …

I asked this in a previous form, but since I asked for a "proof" of mind-independent objects I understandably got few takers. It appears that ever since the "modern" subjective turn, from Descartes t …

I've been reading some recent books that refer to money as the "value form" in Marx. In English translation, Marx does use the term "value form" and also refers to commodities as "values," in the pl …