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Showing posts from July, 2018

Puzzling over Philosophy Problems

When it first came out way back in the last century (sighs) 101 Philosophy Problems was quite an iconoclast. Up to then, the most radical book of philosophy was Bertrand’s Problems of Philosophy , and that book splits the problems into boring categories like logic and epistemology ... So I knew, as a young(ish) philosophy teacher, there was room for a new look at the subject, and 101 PP was it. In time it went on to  sell (I think) about 250 000 copies in about 20 languages. I don’t know for sure as the publisher, Routledge, seemed to think it was a bit vulgar to keep track of things such as sales figures, although they gave me a nice lunch in London! Here's a taste of the book, a problem that up to then had been summed up as a  landmark philosophical problem concerning our understanding of descriptive knowledge situated somewhere the field of epistemology ... but I reinvented as simply the Problem of the Cow in the Field: Farmer Field is concerned about his prize co