On this page are academic papers, commentary, letters to classes, manuscript drafts.

Re: the picture to your left:
Q.: A philosopher is most like

1. The crab, an alien consciousness whom we use for our own ends and with whom we cannot communicate
2. The toddler, who asks questions no sane adult any longer needs to ask;
3. The protecting hand who reaches down from some obscure point of view to help;
4. The academy's Roto-Rooter operator;
5. A member of a 12-step program, stuck at Step One;
6. More than the above.

The links below used to be in groups: Methods; Applied Ethics and Critical Thinking; Language; Miscellaneous, including Philosophy of Education and Native American Thought.) They are now in roughly reverse chronological order, and some fluff has been removed. --Not that these are finished; most are still works in progress. --Nor complete; other work on pacifism, on when a human life begins, on practical reasons for getting a college degree and for supporting higher education, on the mistake of thinking that scientific work can substitute for philosophy, etc., are not included here.

I've also still rigorously pruned anything that might be fun--see Thinking, Nonprofessional for parodies, humor, lies.

The next item I plan to add to this page is a draft following up on the 2011 East-West Philosophers' Conference in Hawaii below, which I will submit to the Nordic Wittgenstein Review. I claim that pacifists and just-war theorists neglect the most central issues between them and neglect the philosophical assumptions (exposed by ordinary language philosophy) that keep both camps from the work they need to do. I plan to give time to this in Finland during my 2016 sabbatical there.


• I presented to the North American Wittgenstein Society in Vancouver, British Columbia, (in association with the April 1-5 2015 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association), on the topic "Just War Theory versus Pacifism: Ships Passing in the Night." This is returning to issues I tried to address after serving as a conscientious objector U.S. Army medic in 1969-1971. I'm working to make a case that the real issues have not yet been addressed by either side and that the real issues rehabilitate the importance of good philosophical methods.


• I have a paper proposal regarding reform of approaches to critical thinking that I worked up for but did not present at the international conference in Lund, Sweden on Reasoning, Argumentation, and Critical Thinking Instruction in February 2015. I have posted a thousand word abstract/summary at Academia.edu. I summarize approaches to critical thinking and point out the extent to which the main approaches tend to become dogmatic and oversimplified. I then sketch an approach which abjures evaluation of individual arguments in favor of clarifying issues, thinking them through, and deliberately recognizing views of those in opposition in a sympathetic way. Some of my readers already know this as "The Worry Method," a term I owe to Don Levi.


• The Atlantic website ran my call for reforms of the Bachelor's degree in January 2014. I claim we should make the B.A. a year longer (and that this is, charitably speaking, overdue) and include a much bigger General Education component. The piece is short, about a thousand words, but still manages to be redundant. It generated commentary on their website as well as on Twitter, Facebook and Google+1 --what seemed to me a lot of traffic. I don't know what that means. It has all been interesting and educational. The commentary provides lots of terrible and pathetic evidence that reform is needed. The url is here but the article is easily found on Atlantic.com by clicking on Education.


• I presented at a joint symposium of the International Ludwig Wittgenstein Society and the Nordic Wittgenstein Society in Abo, Finland, May 24-25, 2013. The title was "From Undermining Answers to Undermining Questions." I'm revising it (in response to comments) for submission, so don't have a copy on my website yet. If there is a coherent claim in it, it is that once you start insisting on arguments for the existence of issues as well as arguments for positions, then philosophy becomes much more subversive. Write me for a copy.


• "To What Extent Can Definitions Help Our Understanding? What Plato Might Have Said in His Cups" appeared in Metaphilosophy in their October 2012 issue. A draft is here.


• Though it's rather lightweight, I'm proud to have been chosen as one of the "commended" entries in the contest held by the British Wittgenstein Society for short essays to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Wittgenstein's death. The contest was organized in connection with their Annual Conference, held in 2011 in Gregynog, Wales. My piece is posted by them on their website. The results are announced at the "Competition Winners" page with links.


• "Theory as Authority" was presented at the once-every-five-years East-West Philosophers' Conference in Honolulu in May 2011. I take as a thematic example the problem of whether just war theory really can justify war against points made by pacifists, and claim that the arguments grounded in particular examples have priority over theories. I wrote on issues regarding pacifism decades ago, and am glad to return to them--contra Steven Pinker, wars and warmongering are an even more urgent global problem now than in the past. This paper is being revised, but I may share if you ask, at least if I don't read it over again first.


• "How Subversive Is Ordinary Language Philosophy?" is a revised version of a paper I read in England at Manchester Metropolitan University at a conference, Being Frank, on the work of Frank Ebersole and on Ordinary Language Philosophy, in April of 2011. It's under submission (and I keep revising it), so please write me for a copy.


• "Are Wittgenstein's Remarks on Pictures Psychological or Philosophical?" was published, finally, as of February 2012, in a volume, Wittgenstein: Zu Philosophie und Wissenschaften arising from a conference of the same name held in Leipzig in August of 2007. A draft is available here.
                The list of speakers at that conference is short and illustrious, at least if we disregard my being on it. It was quite an honor to be included. I've put a copy of the program here and you and I can order the book, edited by Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, for 48 Euros here.


• In May of 2011, in another example of swimming against the tide, I published a piece on awful mistakes in current thinking about accountability in higher ed. It is in the American Association of University Professors' Journal of Academic Freedom, online here. One point made in it is a call for putting educational reforms into the hands of those who have been educated.


• "What Are the Criteria for a Good Argument?" was retitled by the editors as "What's a Good Argument?" (losing track of the centrality of criteria in the essay) when it came out in The Philosophers' Magazine, Issue 51, 4th Quarter 2010. You can buy it from them for, currently, two pounds, here. Or you can read a longer draft closer to the paper I read at a Manchester Metropolitan University conference, (separate from the conference mentioned above on Ebersole and OLP) Where's Your Argument? in April of 2010. This draft is better than the edited version.


• I reviewed at some length Wittgenstein and His Interpreters for the journal Teaching Philosophy vol. 32, no. 2, in 2009. A draft is available on my website. This book has a wealth of resources for teaching Wittgenstein, including two terrific summary essays on the history of various issues and positions regarding approaches to Wittgenstein, applications of ordinary language methods in philosophy, and formidable implications for the future of philosophy.


• In 2009 I did a review of a wide-ranging study of attempts to reform general education issued by the Center for the Study of Higher Education at UC Berkeley. The review is in The Journal of General Education v. 58, no. 4. If you have Project Muse access (as, for example, through the Humboldt State University library's login) you can read it here. Or I have put up a draft copy here. I include some radical recommendations of my own (e.g. Bachelor's degrees should include more minors and a year more of academic work) based on the study's documentation of almost-exceptionless failures to achieve reform--why not, I thought, join the party?


• I wrote a memorial notice for Vine Deloria, Jr, published by the American Philosophical Association in their Newsletter on American Indians in Philosophy in fall 2006. Their archives were flitting from server to server, so I've put a copy of the .pdf file here. This paper addresses points regarding where there are real stakes in philosophy and Deloria's beliefs about the importance of philosophy. My view of Deloria is more akin to that of some of his other Indian admirers than it is to that of many white commentators, who tend not to recognize when he is kidding.


• "Wittgenstein's Accomplishment Is Most Importantly One of Method" (Issue Introduction, Vol. 1, No. 2, of Essays in Philosophy, a web-based philosophy journal founded by (and for several years edited by) my colleague Michael F. Goodman. The journal is now being edited by Dave Boersema at Pacific University in Forest Grove, OR. My essay is available from their archives.


• "Telling the Truth vs. Being Frank" was an invited paper at a conference in honor of Frank Ebersole. It attempts to undermine and answer an attack against ordinary language methods launched by John L. Searle and Paul Grice. I point out that in Searle's own work in philosophy of mind on what he calls "background" he pulls the rug from under his own feet. This paper is geriatric but the issue is still in need of re-examination--Grice and Searle are both guilty of serious question-begging but their views were and still are uncritically accepted by many philosophers. This draft is somewhat revised from its form at the conference.


• On the Nonexistence of Perceptions argues that the philosophical concept of perceptions is a myth--that no things fitting that account exist and that what perceptions do exist cannot be fixed up to fit the philosophical account as it is required by the argument from illusion, the dreaming argument, or problems about skepticism and knowledge. My main arguments are anticipated by J.L. Austin, although philosophers seem to think they can do an end run around Austin by, e.g., changing the subject to "qualia." His and my objections are just as devastating over there near the sidelines despite attempts to rescue a bogus concept via technical vocabulary.


• Skepticism and representational theories of mind require the soundness of the Argument From Illusion. Here's an abbreviated attack in the form of an example, checking on what we would say as opposed to what our philosophical temptations lead us to expect.Some readers have asked if this is tongue in cheek. It is not. See Frank Ebersole's "Does It Look the Color It Is?" found in his book Language and Perception, Alibris 2002.


• "Progress in Philosophy" Draft of the preface for a book mss., Language as Signs.


• "Being a Philosopher: The First Step," commentary, distributed at the conference, on a paper by Claudine Verheggen, "Wittgenstein's Philosophical Stance on Meaning," Pacific Division Meeting, American Philosophical Association, 3 April 99, Berkeley, CA;
  at issue is how to understand John McDowell's claim that Wittgenstein rejects philosophical problems. Dr. Verheggen was arguing against McDowell, based on a lack of understanding. This piece is included here mostly for the suggestion some of us learned from Frank Ebersole, that problems be approached as in a twelve-step program: first step--admit you have a problem.


• "What's Education For?" in Thought and Action, November 98: available from their archives at the NEA publications website. I keep this posted because it was and is unlike other answers to this question. Briefly, education is for lots of different (and different kinds of) things; current too-narrow views drastically and catastrophically diminish education.
   
• An attack against moral relativism and against moral absolutism. Thinking we have to choose between them is one of the most bewildering currently prevalent assumptions in ethics.


• "The Very Idea of Language"
  A draft of this was presented to the Nameless Philosophy Group (that's its name), an illustrious group of faculty and alumni from the University of Oregon's graduate program in philosophy, in Eugene OR, 18 June 2004. They have had over ninety meetings so far. The claim (which also shows up in the Leipzig conference paper above, though in abbreviated form) is that the pervasive differences between how philosophers talk about language in context-free ways and how we talk about language otherwise--those differences mark begged questions, Cartesian pictures, and fatal flaws in philosophical concepts of language.


• "The Ins and Outs of Language"
  A paper attacking the idea that we can, in a context-free way, know what is inside and what is outside language unless we beg questions and assume the picture of language as signs. This was written for the Spring 2003 391 Philosophy reading group at Humboldt State Univ., and revised repeatedly afterwards.


• What's Wrong with Definitions? against the current overuse of definitions in academic work and against the idea that understanding can rest on definitions. A later and much changed version of this, developed as a classroom handout, was published in Metaphilosophy in 2012--see above.


• Abstract of an academic paper on Alcibiades, who gives the last speech in Plato's Symposium. Here's an early attempt, influenced by Henry Alexander and by Gerald A. Press, to push further the importance of deliberate irony in Plato's Platonism. This is also closely related to other works above deflating the value of definitions, rules in general, theories as authority, and criteria of good arguments. Plato is still leading the pack by several lengths.


• "American Pragmatism's Roots in Native American Philosophy," solicited review of Scott L. Pratt's Native Pragmatism (Indiana Univ. Press, Bloomington: 2002), in American Indian Culture and Research Journal (edited at UCLA), Spring 2003. Pratt makes a case for Native influences shaping American pragmatism in enduring ways with consequences for politics, government, and philosophy.


• "How to Take What Indians Say," a short response to relativism among some Native American Studies scholars. I take such relativism to be short-sighted and almost as bad as the absolutism it resists.
  Related papers: I have presented three times at Navajo Studies Conferences. The theme is similar in each paper: some Western-Civ-type philosophical view is revealed as mistaken or empty by comparison with Navajo thinking. E.g. 1. social power dynamics require marginalization of the kinds sketched by Foucault in Madness and Civilization and other works; 2. whatever art is, it is on a separate page from the rest of a culture's life; 3. health as a concept belongs to science, in particular medicine. These papers are in pretty rough condition, but I'm willing to share, along with reports I wrote on the trips.