Dale Dorsey (1976-2026)
A week ago, on April 13th, my friend Dale Dorsey died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in his office at the University of Oxford. Continue reading →
The Hanged Man
Personal Homepage of Matt Brown
Latest posts
Why We Should Be Reading Paul Churchland Right Now
The more I get into philosophical and philosophy-adjacent discussions of current-generation "artificial intelligence" (large language models and the like), the more dismayed I am not to see any discussion of the large body of relevant work by Paul Churchland. Continue reading →
The Loss of Hope
It feels like in the last 10 years all the hope and most of the progress of the prior century have evaporated. Continue reading →
Internet History, Media Archaeology
I like these little glimpses into Internet Past... one of the things I like is how these kinds of discussions help us think about not only how we got where we are, but the contingency of the current way of things, which also entails the possibility of a different future than the trajectory we seem to find ourselves on. Continue reading →
There is no Analytic/Continental Divide in Philosophy, and there Never Was — A sketch of an argument
Who was the German philosopher and mathematician writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, who explored the philosophical foundations of mathematics and logic and argued against theories that would reduce mathematics, logic, or meaning to psychology? He posited … Continue reading →
September 2020
It is a week out from my birthday, and I’m feeling a bit reflective. It has been quite the year. For me, a year of personal, professional, and numerological milestones and achievements Continue reading →
Wishful Thinking and Moral Imagination
A bit of writing that I was doing for my book went on a tangent that I really cannot incorporate into the book. But I decided to follow it anyway, because it was fun and interesting and kind of weird, … Continue reading →
Philosophy under Trump
Do philosophers have something unique to offer in response to, or during the presidency of, Donald Trump? Trump’s election to the highest office of our country has taken me by surprise. It isn’t that I doubted that this was a … Continue reading →
Notes on Anthony Weston’s How to Re-Imagine the World
Anthony Weston‘s How to Re-Imagine the World: A Pocket Guide for Practical Visionaries is, like Fesmire’s John Dewey and Moral Imagination and Johnson’s Morality for Humans, a book about moral imagination and its importance for our decisions about how to … Continue reading →
Notes on Mark Johnson’s Morality for Humans
Mark Johnson‘s Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science is another book, like Fesmire’s John Dewey and Moral Imagination, that I am hoping to use as a background for Science and Moral Imagination. In the book, … Continue reading →