Maverick Philosopher

Dennett, Anthropomorphism, and the 'Deformation' of the God Concept

One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of th...

Why Not be a Nominalist about Sets?

The resident nominalist comments: Nominalists say that the conception of an actual infinity of natural numbers depends on there being a set of all such numbers. But Ockhamists do not believe in sets. They say that the term ‘a pair of ...

Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? Part I

I met with Steven Nemes recently for a productive and intense discussion of people, politics, religion, and in particular the metaphysics of individuality and possibility. I think of Nemes as my 'philosophical grandson.' Although never ...

More on Tribalism and the Identity-Political Right

A re-post from 2 November 2017 emended and supplemented. ................................... This entry continues a discussion with a Right-identitarian interlocutor. My current position is one of rejection of both Left- and Right-ide...

Richter on Rationality

Hi, Bill. I love your Maverick blog. I’m Reed Richter: a 71 yr old ex-academic, retired and living in Chapel Hill, NC. I was an undergrad philosophy major at UNC and did my PhD at UC Irvine. My early work was on decision theory. ...