•  22
    Postmodern Pragmatism
    Philosophical Topics 36 (1): 1-15. 2008.
  •  8
    Putnam und Rorty über Objektivität und Wahrheit
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42 (6): 989-1006. 1994.
  •  34
    The Lessons of Solipsism
    Idealistic Studies 21 (2-3): 151-154. 1991.
    Solipsism is the strangest creature in philosophy’s menagerie. It seems just that its defense should be so simple and reasonable. As similarity or difference in the length of things presuppose their commensurability in respect of spatial extension, so similarity and difference between conscious subjects presuppose the commensurability of their experience. But comparing what I feel with what I fail to feel seems worse than inconvenient. Like location and duration or color and quantity, these seem…Read more
  •  24
    Government in Foucault
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (4): 421-439. 1991.
    The forms and specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpretation of power as Wille zur Macht, ‘will to power.’ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says…Read more
  •  1
    Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Reviewed by (review)
    Philosophy in Review 8 (10): 402-405. 1988.
  •  10
    Is Locke’s Semiotic Inconsistent?
    American Journal of Semiotics 11 (3/4): 23-31. 1994.
  •  146
    Knowledge and adaptation
    Biology and Philosophy 12 (2): 233-241. 1997.
  •  23
    Critical Notice of Putnam (review)
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (4): 665-688. 1994.
  •  72
    Forbidding Knowledge
    The Monist 79 (2): 294-310. 1996.
    Are there matters we should exclude from inquiry? Personal privacy apart, it seems difficult to justify. By what higher, better knowledge than the results of inquiry itself could one know what inquiry ought not know? Is such knowledge a metaphysical intuition whose authority cannot be questioned? Isn't that a fairy-tale? But what about ethics? What about ethical limitations on knowledge? Can they not concern more than simply what to do with knowledge we have, concerning instead the very dynamic …Read more
  • David Ingram, Critical Theory and Philosophy (review)
    Philosophy in Review 11 (3): 200-201. 1991.
  •  13
    Dewey and the Art of Experience
    Pragmatism Today 7 (1): 93-99. 2016.
    Instead of following the behaviorists and abandoning the concept of experience, Dewey wanted to reconstruct it. Dewey was an ardent Darwinist, so whatever experience is, it has to be an evolved, presumably adaptive power. “Experience” became for him one word for the multiplex relation between the evolved, adapted organism and its environment. Human environments include groups and social relations mediated by language. But “experience” is not centered there, or restricted to the use of language. …Read more
  •  39
    A Cool Experiment
    Common Knowledge 24 (1): 1-7. 2018.
  • A. Phillips Griffiths, Ed., The Impulse To Philosophise (review)
    Philosophy in Review 13 (4): 158-160. 1993.
  • What was epistemology?
    In Robert Brandom (ed.), Rorty and His Critics, Wiley-blackwell. 2000.
  •  37
    Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (review)
    Common Knowledge 17 (1): 198-199. 2011.
    Gilles Deleuze has a growing readership in English philosophy, where for long he was eclipsed by brilliant contemporaries like Derrida and Foucault. It is good that we are coming to appreciate his highly original and fascinatingly intricate philosophy. He worked with integrity and genius to do something different in philosophy from everything he was hearing in contemporaries. None of the familiar labels—structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics…Read more
  •  58
    The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness (review)
    Common Knowledge 16 (3): 559-559. 2010.
    Darwin had a hypothesis about descent with modification, and a Spencerian view of the evolution as selfish conflict. Biology remains marked by the dualism today. Many, inside the discipline and out, suppose that taking an evolutionary perspective just is to seek the secret selfishness that “explains” a successful form of life. Nowhere is this view of evolution more entrenched than in the theory specialists call Sexual Selection, a theory on the evolution of everything that differentiates the sex…Read more
  •  81
    The so-called linguistic turn in philosophy intensified (rather than overcame) the rationalism that has haunted Western ideas about knowledge since antiquity. Orthodox accounts continue to present knowledge as a linguistic, logical quality, expressed in statements or theories that are well justified by evidence and actually true. Restating themes from the author's Knowledge and Civilization (2004a), I introduce an alternative conception of knowledge designed to overcome these propositional, disc…Read more
  •  28
    Modes of Margin in Philosophy
    Common Knowledge 24 (2): 181-189. 2018.
  •  74
    Review of Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (10). 2008.
  •  2
    Foucault's nominalism
    In Shelley Tremain (ed.), _Foucault and the Government of Disability_, University of Michigan Press. pp. 93--107. 2005.
  •  37
    Foucault's theory of knowledge
    In Christopher Falzon (ed.), Foucault and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 143--162. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: References.
  •  25
    Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia (review)
    Common Knowledge 23 (1): 104-104. 2017.
    Wikipedia currently exists in 270 languages, with more than 20 million articles. The English-language Wikipedia has 2.5 billion words, sixty times the size of Britannica. It may be the largest collaborative initiative in history, and influences what people the world over know or think they know. Wikipedia’s distinctive feature is the non-expert, non-professional, non-certified, non-formal production of knowledge with credible content. Academics like to sneer at that, even as more of us acknowled…Read more
  • Difference Unlimited
    In Gary Brent Madison (ed.), Working through Derrida, Northwestern University Press. 1993.
  •  44
    Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (review) (review)
    Common Knowledge 8 (1): 208-208. 2002.
    According to Davidson, Quine, by overcoming the distinction between analytic and synthetic truth, made the philosophy of language a serious subject. According to Rorty, Davidson, in concluding that "there is no such thing as a language," attains its most advanced position. How impoverished philosophy has become! It even becomes a kind of accomplishment to show that work which seemed new and different (deconstruction) is really the same old thing. Wheeler's book domesticates deconstruction for An…Read more
  •  81
    Games of Sport, Works of Art, and the Striking Beauty of Asian Martial Arts
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 40 (2). 2013.
    Martial-arts practice is not quite anything else: it is like sport, but is not sport; it constantly refers to and as it were cohabits with violence, but is not violent; it is dance-like but not dance. It shares a common athleticism with sports and dance, yet stands apart from both, especially through its paradoxical commitment to the external value of being an instrument of violence. My discussion seeks to illuminate martial arts practice by systematic contrast to games of sport and works of per…Read more
  •  37
    Barry Allen explores the concept of knowledge in Chinese thought over two millennia and compares the different philosophical imperatives that have driven Chinese and Western thought. Challenging the hyperspecialized epistemology of modern Western philosophy, he urges his readers toward an ethical appreciation of why knowledge is worth pursuing.