Er, Humbert's an unreliable narrator, sure, but I think you're being way too hard on Gerhard Brand. The medieval tradition of courtly love is deeply, deeply problematic, a fact that Brand seems to be invoking, and I don't think it's crazy to suggest that it's problematic in ways similar to the ways Humbert's attitudes are problematic.

An argument could certainly be made for Nixon/Agnew having an advantage over more recent Republican candidates when it comes to their policies, but any policy advantage they may have is surely insufficient to make up for the points they lose for aggressively subverting the democratic process and the rule of law to the extent that they did.

At the end you consider the problem that when you are dreaming, you generally don't notice the gappiness and irrationality, which of course raises the possibility that there was gappiness and irrationality in your apparently consistent and detailed chess experiment, but you just didn't notice. But you dismiss this as an "additional" doubt beyond the "simply solipsistic" doubt. I'm not satisfied; this distinction between "simple" and "additional" doubt looks fairly suspect to me, more convenient than principled.

I don't know if that wasn't up last time I searched, or if I just didn't search hard enough; I did my own translation a few years ago. For balance, I like to give my students both sides of the discussion, and at least give them access to the Heidegger essay Carnap criticizes. I have found translations of "What is Metaphysics?" online, but the only translation I've found which includes the postscript (http://www.wagner.edu/departments/psychology/sites/wagner.edu.departments.psychology/files/download/Martin%20Heidegger%20-%20What%20Is%20Metaphysics.pdf) obscures the fact that Heidegger was at least in part responding to Carnap (again a translator doesn't use "overcoming" for "ueberwindung"; Miles Groth uses "getting over" instead. Since the paragraph does contain a reference to "will to power," I guess at least the connection to Nietzsche isn't completely obscured in this case). Also, I don't know if I need to change my adobe PDF reader settings or if there's something wrong with the file, but the Greek words don't show up properly, though I guess that's a minor issue for me since I couldn't read them anyway. Not sure if I want to do my own translation of Heidegger.

Well, if Hitler was involved in choosing them, he was notable for odd choices. What in Speer's previous career would make someone think he was suited to be Armaments Minister? In this specific instance, Hitler perhaps was tired of generals who thought they knew better than he did and failed to execute his plans exactly as ordered; perhaps he thought those two would be less likely to improvise.

86% Jill Stein, which surprised me; I usually think of the Greens as more out there than me. 78% Obama. 34% Ron Paul; I thought I'd be more libertarian than that. And for Romney, 2%. I swear I didn't try for that on purpose. I guess the choice for me this fall really is pretty clear.

OK, it seems to me that someone who wants to maintain that perception can't be improved with training has two things they can say about the chicken sexers. They can say, first, that chicken sexers aren't actually better at untrained people at distinguising male from female chicks. Second, they can claim that the difference between chicken sexers and others isn't a different in perception. I should perhaps say explicitly that I'm assuming you wouldn't make the first response in the case of the chicken sexers (since that response involves simply denying well-established empirical facts). But it often sounds like you intend your response to the philosophical intuition case to be a response of the first type. If the argument is based on an analogy between perception and intuition, and responses of the first type don't work for perception, then the analogy establishes the opposite of what you intended; it suggests we shouldn't expect responses of that type to work for intuition either. Thus, I have tried to focus on the second kind of response. And it seems to me that the second kind of response is exceedingly weak. If, say, philosophical training enables philosophers to intuitively distinguish justified from unjustified cases of killing, in cases where non-philosophers can see no distinction, it seems to me that this would be a way of saying that the expertise defense is at least partly justified. That is, if it is granted that the trained philosophers are making better distinctions, I don't see why it makes much difference whether the betterness itself is intuitive. Of course, perhaps this is part of some two-pronged argument. Perhaps the claim is that if the intuition isn't better, philosophers should be able to do a better job of explaining what it is that has improved, perhaps on the basis that this should in general be possible when training has produced improvement. But, as the chicken-sexer case shows, the problem with this is that it is by no means generally the case that trained improvements are explicable by those who have undergone the training and improved. Perhaps the problem is that I am granting too much. I'm not really sure how you can describe the increased discriminatory abilities of those trained in music, painting, microscopy, or chicken-sexing as other than improvements in perception. The suggestion that even if they are improvements in something other than perception, the expertise defense can say that philosophical training may make an analogous improvement in something other than intuition is merely a fallback position.

OK, take the simplest example. Trained chicken sexers can reliably distinguish male and female chicks. Untrained people can't. The chicken sexers have improved at *something*, and it's something that's easily objectively measurable. This seems quite different from your free will analogy. Of course, it is open to you to question whether whatever they've learned is perception (or, I suppose, whether what's happened to them is learning). And some of your comments suggest that this is the line you would be inclined to take. So I suppose my main concern is that this seems like hair-splitting to me. To return to the cases that interest us, if philosophical training did not specifically improve intuition as such, but instead provided benefits in some related areas involving interpreting and applying intuitions (by analogy with your remarks on the perfect tone example), I am not sure how that would count as much of a setback for the expertise account.

I'm not sure you've really responded to the issue. There are cases where people seem to get better at seemings; people seem to become better at discriminating colors, in the example already given (studying painting apparently especially helps with this) . Saying that you can't see how this could be possible is hardly impressive in the face of examples where it happens. There are in fact numerous examples of learned perceptual abilities, some better understood than others (chicken-sexing and seeing through microscopes are popular examples in the literature). Of course, we normally only find it credible that someone has learned a perceptual skill when there is some independent test of the accuracy of their perceptions, and philosophical intuitions may fall into difficulty at that stage. But you need to provide alternate explanations of a lot of phenomena if you are going to claim that perception is not learnable, and obvious if perception can be improved by training, an analogy between philosophical intuitions and perceptions helps rather than hurts the cause of philosophical intuitions.

In the final paragraph of a very, very long chapter which is mostly about how taxation is theft, Nozick even backtracks far enough to concede that redistributive government policies might be the best we could do to attempt to rectify past injustices where time has made it impossible to identify the offenders and victims, much less who their relevant descendants are. But most of the time he was much more interested in his abstract ideas than in the real world.

One of the faulty beliefs authoritarians can't seem to shake is that democracies are weak in war, easily intimidated or defeated. More than two thousand years of evidence points the other way, but I guess those who start recognizing that tend to stop being authoritarians.

At least based on the more recent scholarship I've encountered, Heidegger also seriously misrepresents things here. His claim that his resignation as rector was a protest against Nazi excesses does not at all fit with the other evidence available (apparently there's reason to think he was instead pushed out because he was overzealous in pursuing Nazi-inspired reforms and alienated too many people who still had powerful friends). There doesn't seem to be much evidence for his changing his mind about Nazism any time before the end. And Wes, Heidegger didn't just fail to stand up to the Nazi regime; he actively supported the Nazi regime. At the same time, the Logical Positivists fled Europe. The Kantians mostly stayed, but the number who joined the Nazi party is close to, if not in fact, zero. I don't know the full breakdown of philosophy professors, but a very large number of Heidegger's professional peers behaved far, far less deplorably than he did.

I also have fond memories of watching the show religiously as a kid, but I've glanced at an episode or two on youtube recently and it was really a "boy was I stupid as a kid" moment. I don't think they could have failed to make it less disappointing than rewatching the original ends up being for me.

The case for thinking U.S. intervention in Libya was a good thing depends on a lot of details. I'm not going to claim that Berube has those details wrong, or that they don't favor the intervention as he says; I do consider him fairly trustworthy, and of course many of the things he says can be checked. But most people won't know all of those details, and even those who know some of them will also know that details have not infrequently been wildly misrepresented by the press and various official sources in the cases of past U.S. interventions. So I think the attitude of skepticism toward all U.S. interventions anywhere ever is a much more reasonable one than Berube seems to be suggesting in this essay. Also, there's a big danger involved when foreigners support anything at all; it invites those who oppose whatever the foreigners support to make nationalistic arguments that whatever it is must be something that just helps foreigners and is bad for the country (otherwise foreigners surely wouldn't support it!) And nationalistic arguments like that are often popular. In the course of his discussion Berube seems to admit that this is a legitimate worry. It seems to be difficult to convince people of how big of a problem this is; it's also possible that some of those Berube criticizes so harshly think this is a big part of the problem with the intervention, but aren't talking about it because it's not a point that people are likely to be moved by.

Compare the first part of Beyond Good and Evil (On the Prejudices of Philosophers) to Carnap's view of metaphysics. Nietzsche says philosophical systems are really just expressions of the values of their creators. Same as Carnap. Nietzsche says that the "synthetic a priori" principles of Kant are false, but necessary. Seems like a difference, but it seems his main point is that they don't represent anything about the world; not the "true world" since there isn't one, but also not the world of experience. In other words, they have no empirical content, and there is no other kind of content. Nietzsche proposes that those who employ different languages might have different logic/philosophy. Sounds a lot like Carnapian conventionalism about the a priori to me. It's not really surprising that Carnap praised Nietzsche; what I find stranger is how few people have noticed the similarities. Still, things may be getting better (and some may be over-reacting; I recently heard a scholar of late 19th/early 20th century thought say that they were all neo-Kantians, which is probably an exaggeration, even if not a huge one).

Hmmm. So it seems that Williamson thinks the expression "the scientific method" can imply something excessively narrow, while the correct attitude is the inherently open-ended "scientific spirit." But I am not sure why he thinks a naturalist is committed to the former rather than the latter, or even why he thinks the former is always intended to be more narrow than his conception of the latter. On the other hand, Rosenberg does seem to be advocating something narrower than Williamson, but if history and literary criticism are his only examples of Williamson's excessive open-mindedness and tolerance, I really don't see the excess. Still, ultimately it's striking how little they disagree about. Perhaps the issue is really Williamson's framing of the dispute? Many are quite concerned that when a serious thinker says "naturalism is a dogma," the statement is likely to be endlessly quoted by believers in much sillier things than literary criticism, people with various superstitions that Williamson isn't intending to defend. There may be something to that, but it's not as if Williamson's essay is particularly unclear on such matters, and I tend to doubt that any amount of careful phrasing is ever going to provide sufficient defense against a determined quote-miner.