The Sooty Empiric

Saint Augustine - "Lord, grant me a sound and complete axiomatic  system, but not yet." In the fifth book of his Confessions  Saint Augustine says that realising that secular natural philosophers could give well confirmed mathematical explanations of astronomical events helped convince him that the Manichaes were wrong. I was struck by this early record of the importance of mathematical reasoning to an African philosopher, and it got me thinking. After all, I like to joke that I am simultaneously the world's best and worst formal Africana philosopher (for the record and in fact, this is only half true: Wiredu is clearly the world's best formal Africana philosopher). What does that actually mean? Is there anything to the notion of formal Africana philosophy? In particular, is there anything more informative than: a formal philosopher who is also an Africana philosopher? Kwame Appiah, for instance, has worked on the epistemic underpinnings of Ghanaian folk bel...

I haven't posted in a while, and just for the sakes of keeping the blog active I am going to post some uncompleted notes for a quite a long post I was writing some time ago and now do not think I will have time to finish. So here is what I had on the idea of methodological radicalism. It may at least be useful as a collection of links to various papers relating to the proper infusion of ethical or political values into our argumentation or modes of epistemic evaluation. Here are two senses of "method" one might use - first, a method is a procedure one uses for generating claims to endorse. So in this sense, for instance, my method for working out what the temperature is in the morning is to check the weather app on my phone. Second, a method might be a procedure one uses to justify your claims. So, in this sense, my method for justifying my beliefs about the temperature might be to tell you the above procedure and perhaps add some reasons to believe that the weather app i...