The Slightest Philosophy: Table of Contents

Thursday, July 17, 2008

INTRODUCTION: The Postmodern Condition

First Naiveté
Beat the Demon

CHAPTER 1: What Can Be Realism

What Realism Can’t Be
Representative Realism
Scientific Realism
Mock Realism Internalized
“Direct” Realism: Straw Man, Red Herring
The Irrelevance of Representationalism

CHAPTER 2: The Same Waking that Dreaming

Postmodern Hopelessness
Farewell to Reason
Are You on the Bus?Farewell to Truth
Madhouse Philosophy
The Postmodern Prison-House
Blind Submission

CHAPTER 3: Seeing Things

Cross Your Eyes
The Case of the Bent Oar
Are Observations Theory-Laden?
Direct vs. Indirect
Arguments from Illusion
Are Objects Objective?
Is Reality Socially Constructed?
One Truth or Many?
Reference & the Oval Coin
Losing the World
Peirce and Turkey Ham
Meaning Idealism
Color and Subjectivity
A Kantian Blind Alley
Inferring Things
Kant in a Vat
You Can’t Get There From Here

CHAPTER 4: Doubting Skepticism

Chancy vs. Chancier
Abducted by Disjunctive Aliens
The Uncertain Cogito
Infallible Certainty
How Much is Enough Justification?
Iterative Skepticism
Cartesian Prejudice
The Ubiquitous ‘Burden of Proof’ Cheat
The Skeptic as Kamikaze
Is This an Appeal to Simplicity?The Simple Life of a Windowless MonadSuper SimpleA Web of Coherence Founded on the Given
The Problem of the Criterion
Hume’s Riddle of Induction
Why Did the Demon Go Out of Style?
Is This Too Negative?
Is This Epistemological Conservatism?
What if Only Strings Exist?
What About Mysticism?
What About Tolerance?
Realist Truth Works

APPENDIX

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Back Cover:

Some say we can’t really know anything, unless we first irrationally accept some things blindly on faith. Is that true? And what is truth, anyway? Is objective truth a bankrupt notion, as postmodernists say? They also say observations are always theory-laden and everything is socially constructed, “including giraffes.” Of course, this means “all knowledge is essentially political,” and “science is best seen as a socially constructed discourse that legitimates its power by presenting itself as truth.” Worse than that, “there is no procedure called ‘turning to the facts’…there is no procedure of ‘justification in light of the facts’ which can be opposed to consilience of one’s own opinion with those of others.” Rather, “the notion of accurate representation is simply an automatic and empty compliment we pay to beliefs which help us to do what we want to do.”

Unfortunately, postmodernists didn’t get that way on account of ignoring the teachings of the Philosophy department, but on account of sincerely imbibing them. The terrible truth is that postmodernism is what happens when somebody who believes what he reads, reads the Philosophy canon.

Avoiding technical jargon and presented in the form of a spirited dialogue between a professor and student, The Slightest Philosophy attacks what it sees as the real roots of postmodernism: the skeptical/anti-realist rut philosophy has been in since the eighteenth century. Opposing the canon from a position of naïve realism, the book’s refutation of epistemological skepticism applies a method usually called abduction, or appeal to the best explanation. The unexpected power of this pedestrian approach becomes apparent when it finally proves its mettle against philosophy’s scariest monsters, including the Cartesian Demon, the Brain in the Vat, the Problem of the Criterion, and Hume’s Riddle of Induction.

Along the way, The Slightest Philosophy also provides a snappy introduction to the central controversies in philosophy. Not only will it make you laugh, it also renders compelling the unavoidable questions too often made to seem obscure. Rarely has epistemology seemed so accessible as in the hands of a writer Antony Flew called “never dull.”