In a recent post, I suggested that I might start a series critical of philosophy. I won’t. I have reconsidered. It’s not that I have suddenly changed my view of philosophy. Rather, it is that it is not up to me to tell philosophers what they should study and how they should study it.
Instead of a negative account on philosophy, I plan to provide a positive account of my own views on such matters. Of course I will be comparing my own positions with the more traditional ones. But the emphasis will be to provide an account of how I am looking at things.
Why do I bother? Mostly, this is because philosophy seems to dominate cognitive science. Because I am interested in cognition, I am interested in some of the same questions that philosophers study. But my approach is different. I have been interested in the question of how cognitive abilities might have evolved, and in what that tells us about our cognitive abilities. As a consequence, I see things very differently from the way that most philosophers see them.
My plan will be to provide a series of posts which, taken together, will attempt to explain how I am looking at things. In the meantime, I shall also continue to post on other topics of interest.
The Heretical Philosopher 