Jeff Maynes

Book Published: Personal Memories of the Early Analytic Philosophers

2022-09-05T00:00:00-04:00

Co-author Steve Gimbel and I have just published a book entitled Personal Memories of Early Analytic Philosophers: Analytic Logic / Synthetic Lives, with Palgrave Macmillan. The book is a collection of interviews we conducted with philosophers and mathematicians (such as Peter Achinstein, Franz Alt, Olaf Helmer, Ruth Anna and Hilary Putnam, and Nicholas Rescher), as well as friends and family members of the early analytic philosophers (including spouses and children of Reichenbach, Carnap, Quine, Grelling, and Oppenheim). The aims of the project are to preserve these voices, many of which are no longer with us, and to preserve our understanding of the human context and personalities from which their work emerged.

More information about the book can be found here.

TEDx Talk

2018-11-27T00:00:00-05:00

I recently gave a talk as part of the TEDx event at St. Lawrence University. In it, I discuss the ways in which we are susceptible to bullshitting ourselves. While we are careful and alert about the bullshit spread by others, the bullshit we tell ourselves is often even more effective, and more insidious.

You can view the video on YouTube.

Review of Mercier and Sperber, The Enimga of Reason

2018-11-27T00:00:00-05:00

My review of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s The Enigma of Reason recently appeared in Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Discplines. You can find it here.

I should note that, despite the 2016 date on the journal, I did not in fact review the book before it existed. I have little confidence in the contributions of clairvoyance to critical thinking.

New Paper: The Method(s) of Cases

2018-11-12T00:00:00-05:00

My latest paper, “The Method(s) of Cases” has just been published in Philosophical Psychology. No preprint up yet, but I’m happy to share a copy.

Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2020.1845309

Abstract

Experimental philosophy has focused attention on the role that intuitive responses to philosophical cases play in philosophical argumentation. The method of appealing to such cases has been dubbed the “method of cases,” and, in recent work, Edouard Machery has both defended its prevalence and uniformity in philosophical practice, and criticized its epistemic value. In this paper, I argue that there is no single method of cases, but rather a set of methods of cases. To defend this claim, I distinguish and articulate these different methods and argue that they better explain several paradigmatic appeals to cases. This result not only challenges the homogeneity of the method of cases; it also stocks our methodological toolbox with additional interpretive tools which help us to not only better understand philosophical arguments, but to better understand the significance of experimental work.

New Paper on Ecological Rationality and Critical Thinking

2017-06-09T00:00:00-04:00

My latest paper, entitled “Steering into the Skid: On the Norms of Critical Thinking” has just been published in Informal Logic. You can find it here.

In the paper I look at the implications of arguments from Gigerenzer and Mercier & Sperber that cognitive heuristics and biases are ecologically rational, that is, that they are rational when used under the right conditions. This might be taken as a challenge to teaching critical thinking skills, as such as skills may not match the reasoning success of our informal heuristics. I argue that a sophisticated conception of the goals of critical thinking, namely, critical thinking as the metacognitive skill to recognize and implement the right cognitive strategies in the right circumstances, helps us to avoid this objection.

Comments and thoughts welcome!