Intellectual Impact
Intellectual Impact
I am interested in the intellectual impact of this blog on the minds of its readers (who range from all over the world). What is it doing to your minds? I ask this as an educational psychologist manque. What you get here is a barrage of subversive thought, relative to received opinion, though highly disciplined. And it will not stop. Is it annoying, exhilarating, disturbing, amusing, infuriating? Is it changing the way you see things? Is it reshaping your mind? Does it come back to haunt you in the dead of night? I myself find it quite liberating and mind-altering, like a kind of intellectual LSD. So, readers, look within and report your findings to me. I will analyze the results.
Two things, Dr McGinn. First on sheer accessibility. It would help your readers enormously, especially those using smaller devices, if you were to darken the font colour and increase the font size. Your thoughts are truly a struggle to read.
On the more substantive side, your arguments would sometimes be more compelling to me if they were a little more formal. Unanchored abstractions often so beloved of philosophers, can smuggle in a lot of beside-the-point purposelessness – often dispelled by a small amount of mathematical modelling, even as an example of what you mean. Nothing past A-level is usually required.
First, let me thank you for responding. Unfortunately, I have no control over the font color and size. I do see your point. Your suggestion about using a bit of mathematics is quite alien to philosophy as it has been practiced for a couple of thousand years and I have no idea how it would work. It is perfectly true that I do little to explain terms and provide background, which makes it hard for people who haven’t studied philosophy intensively.
Well, I am drawn here, by some of your books. I hope that I understand their lessons well-enough (maybe I don’t). I always hope that my mode of seeing the world is challenged, subverted. And if my sleeping nightmares get upended, ain’t that interesting. I despise the current fashion of “cancel culture”; I love those who buck the trend. Dumb-ass tendencies burn themselves out in the end.
Very sensible, if I may say so. But I’m wondering if you detect any change in your mind from reading this blog. The sheer quantity must have some effect, I would have thought.
Historically I started to read your blog because I enjoyed a few books of yours, starting with the excellent Logical Properties. I enjoy the wit, the tone and a wild imagination that comes through your blog writing. I also value sincerity, direct style, clarity and open mindedness that is reflected in your brand of mysterianism at the expense of false certainties and ideologically driven philosophies such as scientism and most forms of reductive (read: dismissive and boring) approaches so prevalent in academic philosophy nowadays.
On a side note related to another blog post: I just came across a recent article by Nicholas Humphrey (who is a psychologist as you corrected me in that comment). He approvingly quotes your characteristically spot on colourful quote from a 1993 paper: “Isn’t it perfectly evident to you, as it is to us, that [the brain] is just the wrong kind of thing to give birth to consciousness … You might as well assert, without further explanation, that space emerges from time, or numbers from biscuits, or ethics from rhubarb.”
Source: https://aeon.co/essays/you-know-what-consciousness-is-you-live-in-soul-land
These are perceptive observations, but I’m interested in whether reading this blog has altered your own mind in any way. I used to know Nick but haven’t seen him in many years (I did once review a book of his in the LRB). Academic philosophy today stinks.