•  144
    Samuel Butler's Contributions to Biological Philosophy
    Common Knowledge 29 (2): 251-279. 2023.
    Samuel Butler is usually remembered for Erewhon, widely considered among the best English satires. He also contributed to philosophical biology in works that collectively compose the nineteenth century's finest statement of the evolutionary argument associated with the name of Lamarck. In writing on evolution, Butler was not presenting science for a popular audience but deliberately intervening in the scientific argument about Darwinism. Surprised by the success of his first venture in philosoph…Read more
  •  19
    Time for Truth: Tarski Between Heidegger and Rorty
    Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 79 (3): 1163-1174. 2023.
    The idea that truth is eternal is an old one in philosophy, and I do not propose to survey its history here. Yet a sketch of the historical context is useful for my main purpose, which is to discuss the theme of truth and temporality in Martin Heidegger and Richard Rorty. Although both philosophers repudiate eternal truth, their reasons for doing so are different, and this difference reveals a probably irreconcilable opposition between Heidegger and the Pragmatist.
  •  7
    From Leibniz and Georg Ernst Stahl to Albrecht von Haller, Germans of the eighteenth century calved off an experimental physiology from medicine and made this research a centerpiece of their new model university, first under Haller at Göttingen, then under von Humboldt at Berlin. Haller made Göttingen the most important center for the advancement of Enlightenment science in Germany, but that is not where Johann Herder went looking for new ideas in psychology, turning instead to France, avidly st…Read more
  •  15
    Introduction: Richard Rorty, Pragmatic Provocateur
    with Richard Rorty, Nicholas Gaskill, Chris Voparil, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith
    Common Knowledge 28 (3): 359-365. 2022.
    This essay introduces a running symposium on the work of Richard Rorty and its legacy fifteen years after his passing. The arc of Rorty's thought defines a trajectory through American pragmatism, tracing a variation unimagined until he expressed it. His work raised Anglophone philosophers’ interest in American pragmatism as never before and also focused the interest of the whole world on American pragmatism as never before, even though the result was to define a pragmatism saturated with nominal…Read more
  •  14
    Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was once the most famous philosopher in the world, but his reputation waned in the latter half of the 20th century. Barry Allen here makes the case for Bergson as a great philosopher, one whose thought has much to contribute to contemporary philosophical questions. Living in Time presents chapters on each of Bergson's four major works, explaining his theories of time, perception, memory, and panpsychic consciousness, his innovative concept of virtual existence, his obje…Read more
  •  3
    1 Unnatural Nuptials
    In Michael James Bennett & Tano S. Posteraro (eds.), Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 23-41. 2019.
  •  2
    3 Pragmatism and Confucian Empiricism
    In Roger T. Ames, Chen Yajun & Peter D. Hershock (eds.), Confucianism and Deweyan pragmatism: resources for a new geopolitics of interdependence, University of Hawaiʻi Press. pp. 40-48. 2021.
  •  18
    Truth's Debt to Value (review)
    Philosophical Review 104 (3): 463-466. 1995.
  •  31
    Three Kinds of Movement
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 44 (1): 231-238. 2019.
    Midwest Studies In Philosophy, Volume 44, Issue 1, Page 231-238, December 2019.
  •  13
    The Cultural Politics of Nonhuman Things
    Contemporary Pragmatism 8 (1): 3-19. 2011.
    This article confronts Richard Rorty's idea of cultural politics with Bruno Latour's argument for extending democracy to nonhuman things. Why does Latour make this argument? How many of his assumptions might Rorty share? Quite a few, it turns out. Additionally, ethical integration with nonhumans promises to advance the cosmopolitan politics we require for an effective response to ecological crisis
  •  4
    The Genesis of Living FormsNeofinalism
    Common Knowledge 28 (2): 306-307. 2022.
    The work of French philosopher Raymond Ruyer (1902–87) is making a belated appearance in English translation with the publication of these two works. Ruyer is a philosopher of science who continues a French tradition of finding Lamarck neglected and Darwin overrated. Ruyer is also among those who think the best hints for problems of evolutionary biology come from the theory of development. He advances arguments seldom aired in Anglophone philosophy, including a rehabilitation of biological teleo…Read more
  •  7
    Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese by Byung-Chul Han
    Common Knowledge 26 (1): 186-186. 2020.
  •  17
    Richard Rorty
    Philosophy Today 61 (2): 315-318. 2017.
    A memoir of Richard Rorty as a teacher, a philosopher, an intellectual, and a man of letters, by a former student.
  •  2
    Resonance
    In Vanishing Into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition, Harvard University Press. pp. 210-234. 2015.
  •  42
    Prometheus and the Muses on art and technology
    Common Knowledge 12 (3): 354-378. 2006.
  •  1
    Notes
    In Vanishing Into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition, Harvard University Press. pp. 237-274. 2015.
  •  6
    Simondon is scarcely known to English-language philosophers, though with these translations that may begin to change. They have been a long time coming. Simondon writes a complicated academic prose in French and calls on an unusually wide range of expertise, but reading his books is worth the effort. Individuation in the Light of Notions of Form and Information (1964) is a dense and at times technical contribution to the philosophy of biology, though there is little in metaphysics that is not im…Read more
  •  4
    Interpreting Bergson: Critical EssaysHenri Bergson
    Common Knowledge 28 (2): 303-304. 2022.
  •  1
    Glossary
    In Vanishing Into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition, Harvard University Press. pp. 275-280. 2015.
  •  31
    A more laudable truthfulness
    Common Knowledge 14 (2): 193-200. 2008.
  •  2
    Acknowledgments
    In Vanishing Into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition, Harvard University Press. pp. 281-282. 2015.
  •  32
    Indigenous Epistemologies of North America
    Episteme 20 (2): 324-336. 2023.
    Indigenous cultures of North America confronted a problem of knowledge different from that of canonical European philosophy. The European problem is to identify and overcome obstacles to the perfection of knowledge as science, while the Indigenous problem is to conserve a legacy of practice fused with a territory. Complicating the difference is that one of these traditions violently colonized the other, and with colonization the Indigenous problem changes. The old problem of inter-generational s…Read more
  •  5
    A World without Why (review)
    Common Knowledge 21 (2): 338-339. 2015.
    Little review of R. Geuss, World Without Why
  •  9
    Beyond Human Nature (review)
    Common Knowledge 21 (1): 124-125. 2015.
  •  10
    A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (review)
    Common Knowledge 9 (3): 550-550. 2003.