Corey McCall Associate Professor of Philosophy Elmira College

You might want to check out Eric Cazdyn's The Already Dead. I've only just started it, but it seems to address many of the contemporary issues you mention: http://www.amazon.com/Already-Dead-Politics-Culture-Illness/dp/0822352281/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414863386&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=Eric+kazdyn

I've used literature in a couple courses. In my Bioethics course, I've used Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go as well as Simon Mawer's Mendels' Dwarf. Mawer's book more explicitly addresses bioethical questions, while Ishiguro's book is more of an Existential novel within a bioethics framework. Another book I've used in Environmental Ethics is Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. I plan to use it again, but I hope to use it in conjunction with some of the texts that Nixon analyzes by authors such as Ken Saro-Wiwa, Jamaica Kincaid, and Indra Sinha.

Never mind. Having actually read the piece, I see the problem Monk would have with my simplistic solution. Still, it seems we are talking about least three different things here: two kinds of general understanding and a particular kind. Wittgenstein wouldn't want to identify understanding a sentence with the synthesizing activity of philosophy, would he?

Interesting post. Regarding your first point: couldn't Monk simply counter by saying that music theory and music performance (as well as composition) are very different activities, and that the former strives for a level of generality that the latter does not?

Please add my name: Corey McCall, Elmira College

Have you read Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story? Great on a near-future America in decline that feels awfully like the America of today.

We discussed this interesting podcast in my Philosophy of Natural and Social Science course and an interesting question came up: Papineau does not clarify whether the realism/anti-realism debate applies to theories or entities or both. It seems that he is discussing the distinction at the level of theory, but this could be clearer. Do the terms of the debate change when we are focused on the level of entities rather than the level of theories?

But surely Heidegger was aware of this connotation of Holzwege as Irrwege? I'd like to think that he was, as it might mitigate some of the less flattering characteristics of his prose. Arguing against this possibility, however, is that Heidegger is one of the least ironic of philosophers (odd, that, from someone who read so much Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and was clearly influenced by both).