Blog Review: enwe's meta-blog

For those who don't already know, enwe's meta-blog offers a daily round-up of philosophy blog posts from around the 'sphere. So if any readers have an interest in philosophy but not enough time to check all the different philosophy blogs out there, a daily visit to enwe's site might help you out. It's especially useful now that she complements each link with a brief excerpt, so you can more easily judge whether the post is of interest. It's like a mini carnival, every day!

For those familiar with enwe's meta-blog, note that it has recently "moved" (from here), so you may need to update your bookmarks and blogrolls.

In addition to the daily overviews, enwe sometimes writes about philosophical naturalism, a priori knowledge, and related topics. Recent examples may be found here and here:

According to Quine, no statement is immune to revision. Many philosophers believe that this thesis is true. - Well, at least they use this thesis in order to argue against a priori knowledge. I don't understand why they all believe that Quine was right in this point. Just look at the basic laws of logic. It is simply not true that we revise this laws in the light of new experience. Perhaps we favour one logical system over another. We say for example: "Well, S5 corresponds to our intutions, but not S4. Therefore, we prefer S5." Or something like that. But we would never say that a basic law of logic is false.

The problem I have with the thesis that there are default reasonable beliefs ["reasonable in and of themselves, without any supporting justification"] is the following: I have the impression that the step from the first problem about how to justify our believing in some basic laws of logic on the one side and the threatening circularity on the other side to the conclusion that there are some beliefs who are default reasonable is too quick - and unjustified. It seems to be like a temporary solution, something with which you want to escape the threatening conclusion that our believing in some basic logical laws is simply unjustifiable.

I'm still partial to coherentism, myself...