Political Theory Reporter on Quentin Skinner lecture

I have a report on Quentin Skinner’s lecture at Berkeley from the other night over here at the new Political Theory Reporter blog.

While I’m at it: anyone interested in joining me over there? It’d be nice to have colleagues all around reporting on the wealth of intellectual scholarship in political theory (including of course political history, political anthropology, political sociology, legal theory, and political philosophy) currently taking place but unfortuantely not yet taking advantage of internet interconnectedness. The idea is to keep everyone up on the latest in political theory as it unfolds. It would be nice to eventually have reporters around the Bay Area, Cambridge, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere both across the country and overseas. I’ll make a fuller push to recruit a fuller suite at some point. For now I’m just kicking this off.

Further thoughts on Pragmatist Philosophy and Experimental Philosophy

Following up on some earlier thoughts about Appiah’s book about X-Phi where I made the case that the pragmatists and the experimentalists (x-phi-ers) have more in common than has thus far been explored.  Now I want to air a point of possible divergence.  The divergence, in short, is that experimental philosophy wants to use experiment to help resolve certain pressing philosophical issues whereas pragmatist philosophy presses experiment into service for two somewhat different reasons: a) to help resolve pressing social-cultural problems, b) to help transform philosophy itself so that it may take these more socially-culturally attuned problems as its subject matter.