Category Archives: epistemology

Soundness is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition being a good argument

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 15, 2011 11 comments

I had been meaning to write something about this, but I decided to bump it up my to-do list after seeing this comment from Ashtad: If you aren’t denying its validity (and by your apparent admission in the comment I replied to above, you aren’t), then you’re admitting that it is, at least, “halfway good” [...]

Stephen Law on his debate with Craig

Posted by Chris Hallquist on November 7, 2011 8 comments

William Lane Craig has done a fairly detailed write-up on his debate with Stephen Law, to which Law has responded. It’s excellent, particularly because Law points out how Craig repeatedly misrepresents his views. I’m tempted to quote huge chunks of Law explaining why, but really, just go read the whole thing. One question I’d like [...]

Skepticism is false

Posted by Chris Hallquist on August 23, 2011 10 comments

Recently, Jen McCreight (a.k.a. “Blag Hag”) did a post complaing about a Feministe blogger who declared herself a “sketpic” in that “I don’t think you can know things. I mean know them, know them. Not feel them, not experience them… but KNOW them.” Jen responded that Skepticism is not some ideology where one cannot know [...]

Review of Gary Gutting’s What Philosophers Know, part 1

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 31, 2010 6 comments

In my post on leaving philosophy, I said that “I think philosophy gets even fewer real results than the meager results that philosophers have sometimes claimed,” linking to the Amazon page for What Philosophers Know, by Notre Dame professor Gary Gutting. As an explanation for my comment, I’m going to do a three-part blog review [...]

Three philosophical problems from Plato

Posted by Chris Hallquist on June 5, 2010 Comments Off

If you know only a little bit about Plato, what you know is probably that he had some very silly (sounding?) ideas. For example, that he believed in Forms: thing such as Beauty, Virtue, Justice, and The Good (always capitalized in English discussions of Plato), things that are supposed to be in some mysterious sense [...]