The Practical Ontologist
»The Practical Ontologist« is a compendium of online philosophical production. Every few hours it automatically aggregates, analyzes, and updates.

Featured Article · Examined Worlds

Weird Retail: Stay Crazy by Erica L. Satifka

Yeah, things are weird and scary right now, but I'm still reading books. And I'm still reviewing them. Stay Crazy by Erica L. Satifka was just what I needed right now.I purchased the book from the author at Worldcon in 2016, and I wish I had read it sooner. Maybe in another dimension some other version of me did. Or maybe it's good that I waited until I needed a funny, weirdly-compelling book to read in this dimension.The blurb on the cover compares Satifka to Philip K. Dick, which is somewhat apt, especially if you, like me, appreciate the weird humor of Dick's writing that the movie adaptations never get right. But Satifka is also her own author with her own style, weirdness, and sense of humor. I laughed out loud a lot while reading this, which you might not expect from a book about mental illness, soulless big box retail stores, small town despair, and inter-dimensional warfare.The main character, Em, is not...

Read More › - meta pro

Recent Media · Podcasts & Lectures

Ignatius’ Brain: Food and Sex in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces : Available at Amazon.com — Amazon.ca — Amazon.co.uk — Barnes  & Noble — Indigo.ca — Indi Bound — Kobo — and last but ...
meta Man Without Qualities -

Champagne’s Unified Theory of Consciousness : Warm review by Jamin Pelkey in The American Journal of Semiotics of Marc’s Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs: How Peircean Semiotics Combines Phenomenal Qualia and Practical Effects. ...
pro trad Man Without Qualities -


3 pandemic predictions from Lucretius
meta IAI.tv -

Liberalism, Through a Glass Darkly : Chapter 4, David F. Hardwick and Leslie Marsh: classical liberalismdavid F. hardwickidentity politicsLeslie Marshsocial justiceSpontaneous order ...
meta sci Man Without Qualities -

John Kennedy Toole’s Queer Carnivalesque in A Confederacy of Dunces : Available at Amazon.com — Amazon.ca — Amazon.co.uk — Barnes  & Noble — Indigo.ca — Indi Bound — Kobo — and last but not least, ...
meta Man Without Qualities -

RUMBLINGS: More and more strongly I am coming to suspect that America will emerge from this medical crisis changed in significant ways. Perhaps better, perhaps worse, but changed. Changed economically, changed politically, changed socially. ...
trad The Philosopher’s Stone -

PRIVACY: Several of the comments on this blog have made it clear that I really, really rub some people the wrong way. I must say I am rather reassured by that. As a young man, I was, shall we say, a trifle provocative at times, and though I ...
meta pro The Philosopher’s Stone -

Events: [Revised entry by Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi on April 3, 2020. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Smiles, walks, dances, weddings, explosions, hiccups, hand-waves, arrivals and departures, births and deaths, thunder and ligh ...
meta trad Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -

Humeans should be (Kenneth-)Pearceans: I have long thought that Humeanism leads to strong inductive scepticism about the future—the thesis that typical inductive generalizations about the future aren’t even more likely than not—roughly becaus ...
meta Alexander Pruss -

Moral Luck and Amber Alerts: In this video clip, a person playing a video game is interrupted when his phone blares out an amber alert. The person’s unlikely journey can be seen as illustrating the problem of “moral luck,” which is posed to K ...
pro Blog of the APA -


Gross inequalities in a time of pandemic Understanding Society -

Luca Incurvati’s Conceptions of Set, 2: We are still on Chapter 1 of Luca’s book. Sorry about taking longer than I had intended to get back to this. But I’d promised myself to get the answers to the Exercises for Chs 32 and 33 of ...
meta sci trad value Logic Matters -

Episode 21: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim: Like everyone else, my life has been upended by the global pandemic.  I have five kids in public schools here in South Carolina (plus one very rambunctious and ornery toddler), so I am now a homeschooling ...
meta pro trad Virtue Blog -

Pandemocracy and the State of Exception: These reflections are not only the product of our current global crisis but also respond to the theoretical challenge of thinking otherwise about the nature of biopolitical governance, the challenge of ...
meta trad An und für sich -


Michael McKenna Guest Post: Worries about on-line teaching and the new normal??
meta pro PEA Soup -

Michael McKenna Guest Post: Worries about on-line teaching and the new normal??

Hello out there, PEA Soupers. I hope all of you are healthy and taking good care of yourself and your families. I happened to be talking on the phone with David Shoemaker last night while we were sharing a few end-of-the-week cocktails, and he asked if I might post something on PEA Soup. It’s about a couple points that came up when we were discussing a conversion to online teaching. I was sharing with Dave my thoughts about a recent memo from the dean of our department’s college. He remarked in passing that higher education could be at a crossroads, and this was in the context of noting that we do not know what the long-term implications will be of this nationwide conversion to online teaching in higher education. I made two points to Dave about this that he and I thought might be worth sharing. First, it would be unfortunate if our collective short-term efforts to respond well to an immediate crisis provided a way for administrators to move many of us in the direction of online tea... Read More ›

PEA Soup · Featured Blog

A Soupy Pacific APA
Thanks to Iskra Fileva’s and Olivia Bailey’s suggestion, we are happy to have PEA Soup host sessions that had been scheduled for the now-cancelled Pacific APA. These include colloquia, symposia, and author-meets-critics sessi...Read More ›

Online teaching ideas and resources.
Hoping folks share information here about their experience teaching online. What has worked well and what problems have you faced? Which platforms do we like best? How can we capture our students’ attention online when we lack the ...Read More ›

Isn’t now a good time to try to make virtual conferencing work?
There are a lot of reasons to try to make virtual conferences work. They are much less expensive to attend and thus much more inclusive. They are much better for the environment. And they have the potential to save a lot of travel time. ...Read More ›

Events
[Revised entry by Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi on April 3, 2020. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Smiles, walks, dances, weddings, explosions, hiccups, hand-waves, arrivals and departures, births and deaths, thunder and lightn...Read More ›

Medieval Theories of Obligationes
[Revised entry by Paul Vincent Spade and Mikko Yrjönsuuri on April 3, 2020. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Obligationes (literally, "obligations") or disputations de obligationibus were a medieval disputation format that became ...Read More ›

Fallacies
[Revised entry by Hans Hansen on April 2, 2020. Changes to: Main text] Two competing conceptions of fallacies are that they are false but popular beliefs and that they are deceptively bad arguments. These we may distinguish as the bel...Read More ›


Coronavirus! The Movie
meta IAI.tv -

John Kennedy Toole : Deceased on this date. Washington Post. a confederacy of duncesJohn Kennedy Toolenew orleansphilosophical literatureThelma TooleWalker Percy ...
meta pro sci trad Man Without Qualities -


Science in the time of coronavirus
meta trad IAI.tv -

Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition: Review : Ian Ground in the TLS 4eCognitiondistributed cognitionrepresentationalismsituated cognition ...
meta sci Man Without Qualities -


Impermanence, interdependence and Buddhist reflections on Covid-19
meta trad IAI.tv -

EPISTEME: 17(1) : Cambridge University Press EPISTEMEEpistemologysocial epistemology ...
pro Man Without Qualities -


The bogus mysteries of consciousness
meta sci IAI.tv -


Mini-Heap
meta pro Daily Nous -


Pandemic Effects on Conference & Event Planning for 2021 & Beyond
meta pro trad Daily Nous -

THERE IS SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT ZOOM: Next Thursday I shall spend an hour visiting a class on the Critique being taught by a professor at the University of Wyoming. Not bad....
pro trad The Philosopher’s Stone -

Ann-Sophie Barwich: What is it Like to be a Philosopher?: This is an excerpt from an interview with Ann-Sophie Barwich, Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington who talks about being baptized in protest in East Germany, acti...
pro Blog of the APA -

Enowning: Review "The Question Concerning Technology" with Dr. Duane Armitage...
pro trad Enowning -

Enowning: Here-Being in The Middlebury Campus German philosopher Martin Heidegger is famous for his theory of Dasein, or “There-Being.” For Heidegger, the temporary nature of things renders them meaningful. Thus, meaning in a person’s life comes from...
meta trad Enowning -

Against Capital Punishment: 2020.04.02 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Benjamin S. Yost, Against Capital Punishment, Oxford University Press, 2019, 280pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780190901165. Reviewed by Jeffrey W... Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews -


Weird Retail: Stay Crazy by Erica L. Satifka
meta pro Examined Worlds -

A World is Ending: My article on the pandemic in the journal Identities can be found here. ...
pro trad Larval Subjects -

A conjecture on deferralist indexicalism: Imagine we do take propositions to be formed by (essential) indexicals. That is, sentences could have indexicals and non-indexicals (substantive) but:i. only indexicals directly refer - ouch, hard thi ...
meta sci trad No Borders Metaphysics -

Do New York State’s Ventilator Allocation Guidelines Place Chronic Ventilator Users at Risk? Clarification Needed: In  his recent essay, Joseph Fins  argues that I “notably misrepresented” the position of the New York State Task Force on Life ...
pro Hastings Bioethics -


A. Spanos:  Isaac Newton and his two years in quarantine:  how science could germinate in bewildering ways (Guest post)
pro trad Error Statistics -


Wisdom and Chaos
meta pro trad Splintered Mind -

The Ultimate Crisis of Civilization: Why Turn to Philosophy?, #6–Speculative Naturalism, the Radical Enlightenment and Ecological Civilization.: APP EDITORS’ NOTE: The essay below, Arran Gare’s “The Ultimate Crisis of Civilization: Why Turn t ...
pro Against Professional Philosophy -

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