Philosophy

In my final undergraduate year at Berkeley, I read a paper called "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" by the philosopher Hilary Putnam. I found it very stimulating and highly entertaining, with its thought experiments involving Twin Earth, cats remoting controlled from Mars, and living pencils. Putnam's conclusion was that the meaning of words could not possibly be stored in the mind of a speaker. It was a conclusion that I vehemently disagreed with, but I couldn't initially figure out where the hole in his argument was. My fascination with this paper and my obsession with proving it wrong led me deeper and deeper into an interest in philosophy — and not just philosophy of language.

To this day I am ocassionally struck by the desire to read some hard core philosophy. Do you need any further proof that I’m a not-so-closeted academic wannabe?

If I had to identify myself with a defined philosophical approach, I would consider myself a pragmatist in the sense that the term is applied to William James, John Dewey, and more recently Richard Rorty and Richard Posner. The fundamental principle of pragmatism is the view that "the ultimate test of what a truth means is...the conduct it dictates or inspires...The effective meaning of any philosophical proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence" (William James). Another way of putting it is to say that there are no universal objective truths independent of the goals to which we apply them.

Click the links below to read my summary of some of the books and philosophers I've read, including an account of where I stand on the issues they raise.

• The Continental Philosophy Reader, a collection of classic writings from 20th-century European philosophers.


• E.M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist
• Donald Davidson, Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation
• Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (and it’s a good thing too)
• The Philosophy of William James: An Introduction, by Richard Gale
• Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher
• Yemina Ben-Menahem, ed, Hilary Putnam
• Robert Nozick, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World
• Alex Orenstein, W.V. Quine
• The Library of Living Philosophers, The Philosophy of W.V. Quine
• Pessin and Goldberg, eds, The Twin Earth Chronicles
• Sir Karl Popper
• Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand Reader
• Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism
• Rorty and His Critics
• Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
• Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision