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Tony Bologna
On The Very Idea - A Philosophy PodcastEpisodes
Tony Bologna
On The Very Idea - A Philosophy Podcast
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Episodes of On The Very Idea
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In this final episode of a three part series on John McDowell's Mind and World, I take a look at McDowell's Transcendental Argument. I feel his transcendental argument comes up a bit short in making McDowell's case and neither does it seem to h
In this second episode of a 3 part series on the work of John McDowell, I look at McDowell’s epistemic distinction between the active and the passive. When we perceive the world, are we soaking up empirical data like a dull sponge or actively s
In this first episode of a three part series on John McDowell, I talk a bit about the splash that McDowell's Mind and World made on the philosophy scene when it was published in 1994. Then, I get into and onto the work of McDowell's philosophy
In this final installment of a four episode series, I take a look at criticisms of Thomas Kuhn's idea of incommensurable scientific paradigms. Kuhn makes use of a vague notion of seeing that allows him to say some surprising things about how pe
In this third installment of a four part series on Thomas Kuhn and the allegedly incommensurable revolutions of science, I look at the idea of epistemic incommensurability. Last episode, I looked at semantic incommensurability - a more intuitiv
In this second episode of a four part series on the work of Thomas Kuhn, I look at his idea of semantic incommensurability. Semantic incommensurability as applied to science for Kuhn centers around the fact that the meaning of particular scient
In this first episode of a 4 part installment, I would like to look at scientific realism- the idea that science delivers truths about how the world actually ’is’ in reality. Under this view, science isn’t successful solely because it allows us
In this final part of a two part series on our ability to morally evaluate historical figures, I continue my look at the work of Bernard Williams. After taking into account Williams' theory of the relativism of distance, I look at British philo
In this first episode of a two part series, I look at an issue that has been hot of late (are there any non-hot issues in the internet age?) – the issue of how we should judge our historical heritage – particularly the prominent figures of hist
Apologies for the Buzzfeedesque title - In this final episode of a two-part series on the work of Donald Davidson, I look at Davidson’s work on a theory of meaning, his principle of charity, and, what he believed were his arguments that put the
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
In this final installment of a two part episode on David Hume and practical rationality, I examine Hume's quote "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger”. Sounds selfish. However,
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-mo
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.
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 wi
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 r
In this second part of a three part series, I turn from the logical positivists and focus on Quine's actual arguments against the notion of analyticity. We get into the nitty-gritty of what was actually going on in The Two Dogmas of Empiricism.
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 cen
In this episode, I discuss late stage capitalism in 2021 through a look at innovation in music. We seem to be caught in a ‘permanent present’. This ‘permanent present’ is a place where we cannot imagine a radically different future for ourselve
On the third installment of my series on PF Strawson's undelievered lecture to The Royal Institute of Philosophy in 1979 titled Perception and Its Objects, I look at Strawson's criticism of JL Mackie's scientific realism. Strawson argues that M
In this second episode of a three part series on PF Strawson's 1978 lecture Perception and Its Objects, I focus on Strawson's criticism of AJ Ayer's portrayal of the average adult human's process of perception. Through his criticism of Ayer's a
in this first episode of a three part series, I will focus on PF Strawson's 1978 lecture written for the Royal Institute of Philosophy but never delivered 'Perception and Its Objects'. In this lecture, Strawson develops a theory of common sense
People tend to think of themselves as largely rational beings on life’s important issues and one of these issues is the political. Is there a coherence running throughout the liberal ideology or the socialist ideology or the conservative ideolo
In this final episode of a two part series, I continue looking at the intellectual debate that occured between philosopher Mary Midgely and ethologist Richard Dawkins in the pages of the journal Philosophy in the late 1970s and early 80s. I als
In this first episode of a two part series on the battle between philosopher Mary Midgely and biologist Richard Dawkins, I look at the issue of whether genes can be selfish as per Dawkins' immensely popular book The Selfish Gene. In particular,
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