•  410
    A Note on Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence
    Social Sciences Research Network. 2020.
    In contemporary scholarship, it is readily assumed that Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence either does or does not overcome the ‘problem of nihilism’. This exclusive disjunction, however, is false. It has arisen out of the poor exegesis that Eternal Recurrence is meant to overcome nihilism and, if it does not, then this can be considered a shortcoming of Nietzsche’s philosophic enterprise. But Eternal Recurrence only overcomes what you want it to: if you do not want to overcome nihilism but embrace …Read more
  •  376
    There has been no challenge to ‘the tradition of philosophy’ in contemporaneity: philosophy has since evolved past the criticisms of the twentieth century. Indeed, contemporary philosophy is such a diverse pursuit that it is impossible to identify ‘the tradition of philosophy’. There is, however, an ontological philosophic metatradition. This ontological philosophy is inchoate, lacking a meontological pole. This pole can be provided by the spirituality of the east in the form of the philosophy o…Read more
  •  348
    What the Problem of Evil Properly Entails
    Social Sciences Research Network. 2022.
    It is sometimes thought that the Problem of Evil entails the inexistence of God. However, this is not the case: it only entails the inexistence of an omnipotent-benevolent god, of which the God of Classical Theism is an example. As for ‘limited’ deities such as that of process theology, or malevolent deities such as that of dystheism, the problem of evil is not a problem at all.
  •  316
    Reviewing Mr. Russell’s Problems of Philosophy a Hundred Years Later (review)
    Social Sciences Research Network. 2021.
    Mr. Russell’s Problems of Philosophy is generally considered a classic text within the history of philosophy. This is, however, not the case: every ‘original’ idea therein had been presented by Mr. Russell previously; the book is replete with unoriginal ideas; and a great deal of everything that is considered ‘philosophy’ is ignored in the book. The problematics under discussion are, ultimately, only those of Mr. Russell’s own understanding of philosophy which, as Analytic Philosophy, is quite n…Read more
  •  237
    Ms. Murdoch’s Existentialist Foil in The Idea of Perfection
    Social Sciences Research Network. 2021.
    In her Idea of Perfection, Ms. Murdoch criticizes what she takes to be an existentialist conception of ethics. This conception is not, however, existentialist, either in the sense in which Sartre characterized it, or any of those other existentialists from Dostoyevsky onwards. Whether her alternative ethic is better or worse than that of the existentialist, I do not know; but the one is not in contrast to the other.
  •  7
    The Instrumentality of the Virtues
    Journal of World Philosophies 7 (2). 2023.
    The Virtues by Craig A. Boyd and Kevin Timpe is supposed to be a work about the virtues themselves. Virtue is not limited by language or by race, so one would expect the book to be properly multicultural. However, the entire book is Graeco-Abrahamic, except for a single chapter on Confucianism, which is sometimes erroneous and ultimately below standard. The book is also permeated by an utterly unjustified notion of the instrumentality of virtuosity, which the authors treat as though it were trad…Read more