Author: nogre

Review: After Finitude and Facticality

[cross-posted at The Road to Sippy Cups] Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude © has a very interesting discussion of Hume’s problem, Kant’s Copernican Revolution, the principle of sufficient reason and the relationship between dogmatism and fanaticism. Any one of his analyses on these topics makes the book worthwhile, but I’d like to focus on something different: the fundamental assumption of facticality. Meillassoux has a factical view of the world, meaning that the world is made up […]

Metta World Peace, James Harden and Furbizia

Everyone is saying that Metta World Peace (the basketball player formerly known as Ron Artest) is crazy for elbowing James Harden in the face. I can’t say that I disagree, but I think there is more to the story. Did no one else notice that James Harden walked right into World Peace while he was celebrating? Watch the video. Harden walks directly into MWP. He doesn’t do anything that would cause a foul, but if […]

Trembling Hands 2: Inducing Irrationality

Given an intelligent rational opponent, one who has complete information of the decision tree in a game, it may be very difficult to implement an optimal strategy. All possible moves may be accounted for and hence a stalemate may exist from the outset. One way to proceed is to act as if your opponent may make a mistake — her hand may tremble — allowing your optimal strategy to obtain. Previously I argued that there […]

The Paradox of Unreasonability

“You’re being unreasonable!” One or more of you may have had this directed at you. But what does the speaker mean by it? Presumably the speaker believes that the listener is not acting according to some given standard. However, if the speaker had an argument to that effect, the speaker should’ve presented it. Hence, all the above statement means is that the speaker has run out of arguments and has resorted to name-calling: being unreasonable […]

Philosophy Carnival #141

Welcome to the one hundred forty first philosophy carnival. In my internet travels I found some really cool philosophy inspired posters by Genis Carreras, which I have paired with the links to pretty up the carnival. Zombies, because philosophers like zombies. An introduction to the philosophical discussion of zombies and dualism by Tom B. over at Philosophy of… which looks like a promising new blog contributing “in some humble way to this movement of the […]

Trembling Hands

At least since Selten (1975) game theorists have considered that given a series of decisions there is some small probability that the person making the decisions will make a mistake and do something irrational, even if she knows the right thing to do.  This is called the trembling hand approach: although a person rationally knows the right (rational) thing to do, sometimes her hand trembles and she chooses incorrectly. Therefore, given a game defined by […]