John Schwenkler is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. His research is in the philosophy of mind and action. He is the author of Anscombe's Intention: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2019) and co-author, with Samuel Guttenplan, Jennifer Hornsby, and Christopher Janaway, of Reading Philosophy: Selected Texts With a Method for Beginners (2nd edn., Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming). John and his wife Angela have six children. Twitter: @johnschwenkler Email: jlschwenkler [at] gmail.com
Website: http://schwenkler.org
by John Schwenkler This is the fourth in a series of posts discussing different ways of pursuing philosophical understanding. The first three parts can be found here, here, and here. γνῶθι σεαυτόν, the inscription over the Temple of Apollo at Delphi is said to have read: Know thyself. The maxim has the form of a command, suggesting…
by John Schwenkler This is the third in a series of posts discussing different ways of pursuing philosophical understanding. The first two parts can be found here and here. Several years ago I taught an undergraduate course that I gave the unfortunately profound-sounding title “Know Thyself: A Philosophical Investigation of Self-Knowledge”. In it, we mainly…
by John Schwenkler What is the point of being courteous, kind, and otherwise well-mannered? I suspect that most of us are inclined toward an answer that parallels Thrasymachus’ view of justice in the early books of Plato’s Republic. For Thrasymachus, what really matters to us where questions of justice are concerned is all on the side…
by John Schwenkler This is the second in a series of posts discussing different ways of pursuing philosophical understanding. My first post in this series explained how philosophy can aim to help us become articulate about things we already understand at a practical or intuitive level, much as drawing a map makes explicit the knowledge…
by John Schwenkler This is the first in a planned series of posts discussing different ways of pursuing philosophical understanding. I am the sort of person who can be very good at finding my way around a place, while having almost no ability to translate that capacity into a realistic map of the place that…
by John Schwenkler This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Mind and World, a groundbreaking book by the South African-born philosopher John McDowell, who has taught since 1986 at the University of Pittsburgh. The book is based on a series of lectures that McDowell had delivered at the University of Oxford in…
by John Schwenkler The community of philosophers is mourning the loss of Barry Stroud, one of the great philosophers of the past half-century, who died on Friday, August 9 of brain cancer. Stroud earned his B.A. from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. From 1961 he taught at the University of…