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(2017) Diagnosing contemporary philosophy with the Matrix movies, Dordrecht, Springer.
I begin my presentation of Hilary Putnam's paper "Brains in a Vat" by sketching Putnam's strategy in large, cartoonlike strokes. Like Bostrom's paper, Putnam's engages in a form of radical speculation, albeit in a different and more sophisticated way. The best way to bring out what is radical in Putnam's program is to caricature it in a way that puts its radicalism into relief. Fundamentally, the radicalism of Putnam's program is associated with his claim that philosophy can do a sort of work of that physics, or more generally any natural science, is incapable of doing. To insist on this point, Putnam has to uphold a distinction between logical and practical possibility—or something like that. I begin by emphasizing the way he does this.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-57889-1_3
Full citation:
Bassler, O. (2017). Are you a brain-in-a-vat?: (level of logic: level 1), in Diagnosing contemporary philosophy with the Matrix movies, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 39-59.
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