Top 10 Books of All Time

Yeah, all time. I could even say Top 10 Books in All Possible Worlds. They’re that awesome.

People often ask me what are my favourite books, or the books that have most influenced me – in philosophy, science, history etc. So I figured I’d post ’em here to fuel my laziness; if I’m asked in future, I can just give a URL. Nice.

The Iliad – Homer

Sing, o muse… Not sure what’s more astounding, that it’s one of the first written works in human history, or that it’s still one of the most profoundly moving books, dripping with pathos and turgid prose the likes of which a pitiful writer like myself can only dream. I mean, rosy fingered Dawn, who spread her light across the lands of the deathless gods and mortal men. Sublime.

There’s a also lesson in reading in reading the Iliad, too. It’s the catalogue of ships. It’s almost the peer of all the begetting in Genesis (well, I assume Genesis is worse because I’ve never made it through that whole section). But it’s like you have to earn the rest of the tale. That makes it all the more epic. In fact, every epic has a catalogue of ships. My thesis has its literature review…

Although I still have an unresolved question: who would win in a fight between Achilleus and Arjuna. Man, that’d be an epic bout.

More below the fold…

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Zen Epistemology: Knowing-That, Knowing-How and Everything in Between

This is a post that was originally on my old blog, Logos. However, in the wake of my post about the Knowledge Argument, I thought it might be worth resurrecting it, with a few updates. Here goes:

At first, I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers. Then, I saw mountains were not mountains and rivers were not rivers. Finally, I see mountains again as mountains, and rivers again as rivers.

It has come to my attention that contemporary epistemology is disconcertingly arse-backwards. This is because it’s caught in the uncompromising grip of an obsession with knowledge-that. This, over half a century after Gilbert Ryle famously made a strong case that knowledge-that is not all there is to knowledge as such. Disappointing.

All the way back when I was writing my honours thesis – which applied knowledge-how to Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument in the philosophy of mind – it appeared as though there was at least a modicum of debate going on over the nature of knowledge.

But in the decade that has lapsed since, it seems knowledge-that has come back to the fore an, in my opinion, thoroughly gummed up the works when it comes to some of the most important questions in epistemology: what is knowledge?; to what does it apply?; how is it acquired?; can we really know anything?; is there such thing as a priori knowledge?; can anything be said to be analytic?

These are important questions – more-so than many in metaphysics – because they virtually underpin every other philosophical endeavour, as well as relating to a number of very significant real-world issues, such as ethics (and metaethics), politics, science, and philosophy of mind.

So, what I’d like to do here is espouse an alternative view to the paragon view of knowledge-that espoused by Stanley and Williamson, who recently suggested that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that. In fact, I’d like to espouse the entirely opposite view: that knowledge-that is a species of knowledge-how. An arse-forwards view, one might say.

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