Dr. Brandon Beasley 🇨🇦

Regardless, though, I think the time is again ripe for pragmatism, not just in the academy, but at large.

This sounds uncharacteristically Peirce-triumphalist of me, but, I don't think it is unique to Peirce--my students often find pragmatism in general to be a bit of "fresh air". Though there is always the contingent that think that they 'miss the point', so it's not universal.

how to have an analog fall a syllabus for lower screen time and cortisol levels

how to have an analog fall
a syllabus for lower screen time and cortisol levels

juliannasalguero.substack.com/p/how-to-hav...

Something about being and...time, I wanna say?

I enjoy the effect that teaching Peirce typically has on my philosophy of science students; for them he's like a breath of fresh air, blowing out so many of the previous confusions without sacrificing rigor.

Human Meanings An introduction and a statement of purpose

New post on my substack: Human Meanings open.substack.com/pub/beasley/...

Cobblestone pathway leading to the red-brick Institute of Philosophy building at KU Leuven in Belgium (home of the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science), framed by ivy-covered walls, arched windows, and lush greenery with purple wisteria flowers in the foreground.

Hello, #AcademicSky! We are the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science (CLPS) at KU Leuven. Our senior and junior researchers focus on #logic, #epistemology & #philsci. We’re here to share our work and connect with logicians and philosophers of science worldwide—help us spread the word! #philsky

Yes, I should read the Thorndike! Allen alludes, in the book I read, to the notion of science & experiment as akin to magic. I think you bought me the Principe? I have it, anyway, & have read the first 1/3 of it, but then my dissertation work got heavy, so I put it aside. Time to go back to it!

Yes, but that's on one reading of the 'in-' part, which can mean "in, within, inside"; but it can ALSO mean "on, upon, towards".

My point is that "Anschauung" is more clearly "on-showing" or rather than "in-showing", so to speak.

My other insight from crude translation?

Hegel's notorious "Aufheben".

In crude English? "Up-heave".

Captures the dual sense well: to lift or raise (or heave) up, but also to disrupt, destroy, change (cf. 'upheaval').

Here endeth the lesson. 👨‍🏫

I often wonder just how much contemporary non-conceptualism about "intuitions" in Kant derives from the halo of "strangeness" the word "intuition" has for modern English speakers. Not that there aren't potentially justifiable (if wrong!) reasons for that view, but still--one wonders.

That's also roughly the sense of the Latin in "intuition", but the use of that word in contemporary English obscures the roots of its meaning, something which the literal English rendering brings out.

Hence the aptness of McDowell's calling having a (Kantian) intuition "having the world in view".

But because of the similarity (due to being related languages) of German to English, a literal translations helps here: "Anschauung" is literally "on-showing", that is, something's being "on show" or "in view" for a cognitive subject.

Sometimes translating German philosophical terms into crude, literal English is illuminating. Case in point: Kant's "Anschauung", translated into English since time immemorial using the Latinate word "intuition", which in English has a completely different meaning which confuses the issue.

Preface, "The Difference Between Fichte's & Schelling's System of Philosophy".

"[There is a] need for a philosophy that will…set Reason itself in harmony with nature, not by having Reason renounce itself or become an insipid imitator of nature, but by Reason recasting itself into nature out of its own inner strength."

-- G.W.F. Hegel
(see below for citation)

Human Meanings An introduction and a statement of purpose

New post on my substack: Human Meanings open.substack.com/pub/beasley/...

(Once again, the caveat that I probably far from the first person to make this argument. For one thing, it certainly smacks of Hegel [and Brandom's Hegel]. But I've not really read much about this at all. If you have recommendations, let me know!)

In the first we are finding in the complicated mess a progressive thread of conceptual development that we ought to adopt now.

In the second we are trying to elaborate and understand the complicated mess in its own right, in its own context.

Which is why one can point to the history of science in an argument for philosophical naturalism, while also acknowledging that the history of science was helped along by all sorts of ideas we would now call "supernatural", i.e., the occult, magic, & mysticism.

These two types of history serve different purposes; perform different functions.

Now that I think about it, maybe ALL histories are Whiggish, in the sense that they are all arguments w/ a specific purpose, but some argue for a progressive development, and some for the complicated messy reality.

So-called "Whiggish histories" are not histories at all, but philosophical arguments for the adoption of a certain (aspect of a) worldview or approach to a concept or an aspect of life. So, they cannot exactly be "disproven" by histories which are more detailed, complicated, and strictly accurate.

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

Ends on the interesting note that, while Newton wrote & cared as much about astrology & alchemy as mathematics & physics, in his lifetime he only published his work on the latter but not the former, a distinction that many of his predecessors wouldn't have made, reflecting changing scientific norms.

Finished reading this today, the latest in some reading I've been doing about the history of science and the role played by what we would now think of as occult, mystical, or magical ideas in the progress of science in the 14th to 17th centuries.

"All we sought was the truth that the facts didn’t tell us."

-- Philip Marlowe, in Raymond Chandler's *The Long Goodbye*.

Why AI chatbots lie to us A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic’s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agr...

Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social is always worth reading on AI, and this is no exception.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Idea: Sellars' claim that "means" statements ("... means ___") are metalinguistic and display the functional roles of concepts, is basically his version, in the idiom of analytic philosophy ("the new way of words"), of Peirce's 'pragmatic maxim'.

(I cannot be the first to think this)

It’s kinda fun that “substance”, “hypostasis” and “understand” all kinda have the same base meaning, looking at their etymology. Stand under.

When we hypothesize we place something under, try it as a foundation. When we gain the right kind of confidence, we stand there with it.

"The traditional mind-body problem is...a veritable tangle of tangles. At first sight but one of the 'problems of philosophy,' it soon turns out, as one picks at it, to be nothing more nor less than the philosophical enterprise as a whole."

-- Wilfrid Sellars, "Intentionality and the Mental", 507