Specter of Reason

Context: A woman calling herself "Mom" has made the following claim: Original Sin can only be understood from the heart, not the head. And understood it must be, she says, or else . . . well, I'm not sure how she would have me end that sentence. But apparently it's very important I understand Original Sin with my heart. The problem is, I can't get it past those darn censors in my head. Here's what I wrote: God thinks I deserve to be punished for being born, but God is punishing Himself instead. Since God created me, God is responsible for my birth. It seems only right that God would punish Himself. If God punishes Himself, it is because He wants to. He makes the rules, and he could give Himself a break. He could decide that nobody needs to be punished for sin. But He doesn't. He punishes Himself. That's His choice. God wants to suffer. But let's consider this suffering. God punishes Himself by killing His son. Though that's not quite righ...

[ In July and August, 2010, I made some significant revisions and deleted some questionable portions of this post. ] In " Knowing How " (2001), Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (S&W) defend intellectualism against Gilbert Ryle. Their paper was selected by The Philosopher's Annual as one of the ten best papers of 2001. Yet, as I will argue, they profoundly misrepresent Ryle (and so fail to make a sound critique of his project). This suggests that there has been a widespread and severe misunderstanding of Ryle among academic philosophers. Despite the problems with their response to Ryle, S&W's formulation of knowledge-how as a species of knowledge-that is a stand-alone argument and invites criticism of its own. As I aim to show, a clarification of some relevant issues makes it difficult to fully accept their analysis. In section I, I present intellectualism. In section II, I correct S&W's misrepresentation of Ryle's argument against intell...