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> one simply would opt for peaceful resolution

You can't just gloss over this part; moral philosophers spend their careers trying to define what peaceful resolution looks like. Your philosophy is a good starting point because it establishes some important values (though, as jcurtiswood mentions, you seem to do this axiomatically, without argument), but it leaves a lot of the finer points unspoken and indeterminate. Since to you seem to be hankering for a specific case, consider a surgeon who has 10 patients dying from a virus. Coincidentally, another man just entered the hospital with the right antibodies in his blood for curing the virus and saving the 10 patients. Unfortunately, the surgeon can't harvest the antibodies and thus save the 10 patients without killing the 11th man. The surgeon must decide now, or else the patients will die. What should the surgeon do? Does the surgeon have special moral obligations, above and beyond normal morality, which stem from his role as a doctor? You probably have a strong gut-feeling one way or the other, but it's not clear that your philosophy has a robust solution to this conundrum (after all, whatever the surgeon does he will be both saving and violating life).

To give you a feel for some important questions in ethics, chosen at random: What constitutes consent (can someone "hypothetically" consent)? Is equality a desirable component of outcomes? What exactly is it about a promise that binds people? Can their be laws (or moral rules) without law-givers? These are just a sampling. Because these questions covers so much ground, it requires that a moral philosophy be comprehensive and encompass all these questions and more.

Your philosophy, as it stands, is kinda incomplete. It's not enough to articulate a set of starting values, and say, "Well, I'll do my best to uphold those values through intuition and gut-feeling." It's good that you're interested; if you want a fantastic primer on moral philosophy you should check out Normative Ethics by Shelly Kagan.

Sigh, so it goes:

Person A: As [insert prominent Voegelinian scholar] was saying to me the other day...

Straussian Person B: Who dat?...

Voegelinians have a visibility problem. There aren't many of them and one suspects this is due to a couple of factors:

1. Like Straussians, they present of a critique of modernity that comes out of reading the classics that is vaguely conservative sounding to the ears of your typical 'academic philosopher' interested in the contemporary issues in philosophy.
   
2. To the extent they are 'Voegelinian' and not 'Straussian', they don't accept Strauss' story about Jerusalem and Athens. This tends to make Straussians hostile towards them and unlikely hire them.
   
   (In my little joke of a dialogue, 'Straussian Person B' knows very well who Voegelin is and who the person being mentioned is, I've seen it happen. I'm not saying all Straussians do this all the time, but it does happen in contexts where the stakes are who fills a given job opening. And it also happens completely innocently).
   
   So Voegelinians, with an annoying minority position and without a large network to make sure they get hired, tend not to be thick on the ground.
   
   Syse, is a young Voegelian scholar from Norway who PhD thesis on natural law theory got published as Natural Law, Religion and Rights. He works at a think-tank, I believe.
   
   The Strauss-Voegelin Impasse that he was commenting on was the correspondance of Strauss and Voegelin on varios issues which ended up petering out once they figured out that they fundamentally disagreed on the whole Jerusalem/Athens distinction made by Strauss (a one line explanation). You can find this correspondence collected in the volume Faith and Political Philosophy. The correspondence was edited by two Canadians, so you should buy the book if for no other reason than to support Canadian scholarship! You'll be glad you did. They discuss an issue that is very important (Voegelin is one of the few critics of Strauss who knew the classical texts as well as Strauss did). And there are interesting little bits of academic life in the papers, such as a request from Strauss for a personal appraisal from Voegelin of the work of Karl Popper, who Strauss was trying to prevent from being hired at the University of Chicago. The discussion of Popper is most amusing.
   
   I don't know how much you know about Voegelin, but people who usually don't know a lot about him know his book The New Science of Politics published in the same lecture series and around the same time as Strauss' Natural Right and History. That book is what you might call an 'immature work' even though it was published when Voegelin was in his mid-50's. Voegelin published his best work just after that, starting in about 1965. NSP marks a point where Voegelin had a 'breakthrough' in thinking about 'history' (and it wasn't the gnosticism stuff, he ended up backing off of that pretty quickly) and it took him about 10 years of thinking and research to start being able to make sense of his breakthrough and turn it into a research program. For a good survey of this period, read Collected Essays: 1966-1985. Another interesting way to get into Voegelin (and his later work) is to read his Autobiographical Reflections, which is an edited transcript of extensive interviews Voegelin sat for a biographer, Ellis Sandoz, back in the early 1970's. A fun thing to see is the DVD Voegelin in Toronto which is a recording of a conference on the philosophical study of consciousness held at York University in 1974. Not only do you get lots of Voegelin, but there are other 'heavy hitters' in the video, Gadamer, Bloom and Lonergan to name a few.
   
   After that, there's his Collected Works to wade through, which is just as delightful to read as are those of Strauss, which, sadly, haven't yet been collected into a single authoritative edition.

Reading this comment and your others here, it sounds like we have a lot in common. I'm a Deweyan by training and my dissertation was a reconstruction of education based on my reading of Dewey (that's as detailed as I'll be on Reddit). But I was in a philosophy department rather than an education department so this was more allowable than it seems it might be for you. Based on your reply to /u/blastronaut, you might do well reading more about philosophy as method (particularly in education). It will help you to gain confidence in your own approach and defend the validity of your work. In my opinion there is no such thing as "the" philosophical method (though my analytic friends might take issue with me), but I have benefited greatly from an essay by Tom Alexander called "Dewey's Denotative-Empirical Method." You might also really enjoy Claudia Ruitenberg's collection called "What do philosophers of education do?." Lastly, there is a really great essay by Mary Midgley that's pretty hard to find, but worth it entitled something like "Philosophical Plumbing". If you are in an ed department you might struggle a bit finding support for philosophical approaches to studying education, but is worth having the fight. You will likely need some philosopher on your committee who can temper the social scientists and fight the battle defending the discipline for you. The biggest thing is getting straight in your own mind not only the value of philosophy in education, but also philosophy as method. This is critical. As Dewey's denotative method illuminates, philosophy is empirical in the sense that it starts and returns to reality, but it is not empirical in the narrow sense of empiricism. It is a form of conceptual inquiry that attempts to understand the relationship between belief and action (see also the subtitle of "The Quest for Certainty." I'm happy to continue the conversation via inbox if you want to get more specific about things. Sounds like you are on the right path. Also consider joining PES or a regional PES affiliate if you haven't already. It is a great network to be involved in.

I'm honestly not sure how relevant this is going to be, but I took a Philosophy course in college just last semester for this exact reason (to get the "essentials"). I guess the "right" place to start would be with the ancient philosophers and see which ideas you like and then look for those similar ideas in later philosophers. As I find that sometimes the later philosophers either prove, disprove, or add something to the original ideas. Not that there's anything wrong with original ideas but it's pretty interesting watching the evolution and gives a good idea where it originated.

The text we used was: Questions that matter The only thing I really got out of this text was an introduction to Descartes. I am enthralled by the mind-body duality that he proposed.

This book was my initial exposure to philosophy when I was a teenager. I probably need to read it again as it has been quite a while.

I have also found wikipedia to be a very good source for looking up different schools of philosophy. Like, for example you want something on Existentialism. I would also recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Clayton Littlejohn, in his Justification and the Truth-Connection, takes the idea that truth-guaranteeing justification is required for knowledge and develops it non-skeptically.

The picture that comes out is a kind of knowledge-first epistemology (Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits also owes a great debt to Zagzebski).

The author says that

>In order for the level of justification for a belief [to be knowledge] to be non-arbitrary, it is clear that one should be aware of all of the relevant pieces of information

Williamson and Littlejohn would say the only thing you need to be aware of to guarantee the truth of p is p. They argue that "being aware of p" is just another way of saying "knowing that p". So whether you're justified in believing p is determined by whether you are aware that p, which is determined by whether or not you know p.

Similarly, the only evidence you need to have a guarantee of the truth of p is p. If your evidence is what you know (Williamson believes this. Littlejohn's account is more complicated), then we get: Whether you're justified in believing p is determined by what your evidence is, which is determined by what you know.

What this points to, I would say, is that saving JTB by going for SJT doesn't do much saving: Strong justification just is knowledge.

If you haven't, you should check out What Is Neostructuralism? by Manfred Frank. It's a sprawling book that attempts to bring the German hermeneutic tradition and what he calls neostructuralism (the "new French", Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze etc) into a sort of dialectic in order to illuminate their differences and similarities. It's an honest attempt by one Gadamer's student to engage in a dialogue with the most important issues posed by the radical reinterpretations of structuralism. I just started reading it recently and I wish I knew about it sooner. It also has an interesting foreword by Martin Schwab, which draws it's strengths from overgeneralizing of the situation, giving a great overview. On the other hand, one should be careful with it because the over-generalizations are sometimes misleading. I recommend getting it.

Anne Groton a great recommendation, but don't forget about Donald Mastronarde's brilliant Introduction to Attic Greek. One piece of advice that I would offer from my own experience is to go really far out of your way to learn the different forms of the definite article early on. Knowing them will allow you to parse the basic grammatical structure of a sentence quite easily.

Oh gosh... There is a lot to cover. Paul Churchland is a great resource on neural nets and their implications for philosophy, especially his book The Engine of Reason. One of the most salient things about networks is that their design is inspired by brains, so they make for much more biologically plausible models of cognition than traditional "sentence-crunching" AI. Neural networks have no programming language and simply learn by trial and error (being corrected when they make a mistake). This arguably makes for an interesting argument against the "language of thought" hypothesis advanced by guys like Fodor, Chomsky, and Pinker (IIRC).

You might want to mention the difference between basic feed-forward networks and recurrent networks, whose feedback connections allow for lots of additional functionality, like short-term memory and representing patterns that happen over time. A couple of my favorite example networks are Garrison Cottrell's face recognition network and Terrence Sejnowski's network for reading text aloud off a page.

edit: You might also talk about how their basic mode of operation is akin to inductive generalization. I'm not sure what your level of background knowledge on networks is - if you want me to expand on my of these points, let me know!

Yeah, I've read that review. Rosenberg is great. You might also be interested in Jeremy Wanderer's book on Brandom. It sums up Brandom's ideas in MIE and some of his newer ideas as well in a way that's much more clear and straightforward than Brandom's presentation of it.

Also, that's very interesting about Chinese philosophy of language (something that I know next to nothing about). I did write an essay on the connections between Richard Rorty (who taught and hugely influenced Brandom) and Nagarjuna at one point, so perhaps that's somewhat related.

• This book is fantastic.
  
• The first two sections of this site give good philosophy-specific advice.
  
  The best advice though is to find a senior philosophy student or a generous professor or TA who is willing to give you direct feedback.

I wish I could find the .pdf of the paper, but in all honesty he didn't go much more in depth than Lennox's article on SEP article.

I believe, the essay itself ended up in this book, but I am honestly not sure. It was something he had unpublished but was travelling and lecturing with for some time.

>I honestly find it unnecessary to be so hostile towards this. It's unfair to assume his Aristotle scholarship is affected by his support for Rand.

A reading of the preface to his new Aristotle book would indicate otherwise. It's almost like he can't stop talking about her. As I mentioned in another post, he said in an interview that Rand's "epistemology workshop," which he attended, was "the equivalent of having Aristotle in the room." Is this the sign of a philosopher of sound mind?

That depends on why you're studying Logic.

Do you plan to use Logic as a tool for doing Philosophy? If so, I recommend studying Logic for Philosophy by Theodore Sider. You will get a more rigorous, formal treatment of propositional and predicate logic than what your introductory textbook likely contained. You will be exposed to basic proof theory and model theory. You will also learn, in depth, about several useful extensions to predicate logic, including various modal logics.

Do you want to become a logician, in some capacity? If so, the classic text would be Computability and Logic by Boolos and Jeffrey. This is an extremely rigorous and intensive introduction to metalogical proof. If you want to learn to reason about logics, and gain a basis upon which to go on to study the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, model theory, or computability, then this is probably for you.

Also, perhaps you could tell us what textbook you've just finished? That would give us a better idea of what you've already learned.

Computability and Logic by Boolos, Burgess and Jeffrey is good but seems to cover much of the stuff in Hunter. You may want to dig deeper into set theory, model theory, proof theory or recursion theory and look at some references specific to those topics.

In response to the same question, my Logic professor suggested:

• Computability and Logic - George S. Boolos
  
• Naive Set Theory - P. R. Halmos