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Jy Houston
@jyhouston.bsky.social
30 followers 170 following 14 posts
Philosophers, anecdotes, footnotes
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Season's greetings from the Carnaps
November 15, 2025 at 10:12 AM
jyhouston.bsky.social
Bertrand Russell: "Dear Mr. Levinson, As far as I know, Whitehead never read Wittgenstein. He told me, however, of an encounter with Wittgenstein which was entirely characteristic of the man.."
May 3, 2025 at 9:26 AM
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The literature about Nietzsche is another matter entirely. In 1952, when I visited C.D. Broad at Trinity College... he mentioned a man named Salter. I asked whether he was the Salter who had written a book on Nietzsche, to which Broad, one of the most eminent British philosophers of his generation, replied: "Dear no; he did not deal with crackpot subjects like that; he wrote about psychical research." -Walter Kaufman
May 2, 2025 at 1:16 AM
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A minor footnote in some future history text might observe that in the late 1970s, fifteen of the world's leading thinkers came seriatim to London, rehearsed their philosophical dialogues with an ex-philosophy-student-turned-television-interviewer, filmed final versions on a sound set, broadcast them over the BBC, and later turned the whole thing into a book used in introductory philosophy courses from London to Los Angeles. A far cry from Plato's dialogues, that
March 13, 2025 at 9:03 PM
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... while sailing to Africa in i943 to undertake a special-operations exercise Ayer undertook to reread Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and, in the early stages of sunstroke, underwent a remarkable epiphany during which he understood for the first time the full force of Kant's argument. Unfortunately, once he had recovered loon, his fever he was unable to regain the insight. - PF Strawson, A Bit of Intellectual Biography
March 7, 2025 at 10:11 PM
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Williams’s Oedipal tendencies persisted even beyond Hare’s death. Hare had chosen Peter Singer to deliver the eulogy at his funeral and had asked him to devote a bit of time to an exposition of the main elements of his philosophy. This Singer dutifully did, afterwards apologizing to those present who had no knowledge of philosophy for having done so. Williams, who had been one of Hare’s successors to the White’s Chair in Moral Philosophy at Oxford, was in attendance at the funeral. He leaned toward the person sitting next to him and commented, sotto voce, “It’s not those who don’t know about philosophy to whom he should apologize.” Bernard Williams: A Reminiscence by Jeff McMahan
March 5, 2025 at 12:00 AM
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February 19, 2025 at 6:45 PM
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I will end this Preface on the following personal note. Experience as a member of many committees in Cambridge and elsewhere has taught me the desirability of retiring before one has become too `ga-ga' to realize just how `ga-ga' one is becoming. I am now approaching the end of my 83rd year, and prudence and laziness combine in advising me not to expose myself further in print. C. D. BROAD Trinity College, Cambridge Oct. 16, 1970 Broad's Critical Essays in Moral Philosophy) edited by David Cheney
February 11, 2025 at 9:28 AM
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a lecture to a Cambridge undergraduate society. One of the distinctions which I drew was that between meta-ethics (the theory of the status of moral judgements) and ethics proper and I argued that disagreement in the sphere of meta-ethics made very little difference to people’s moral conduct. When the mild Dr Ewing, the only senior philosopher in my audience, contested this assertion, I basely resorted to an argumentum ad hominem. ‘Surely, Dr Ewing,’ I said, ‘if I were to persuade you of the truth of my contention that ethical judgements are not cognitive, you would not engage in Babylonian orgies.’ ‘Yes I would,’ he replied without hesitation, bringing the house down to my discomfiture. - A. J. AYER "MORE OF MY LIFE" (1985)
February 11, 2025 at 9:20 AM
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February 11, 2025 at 9:15 AM