Ryan’s Outline of Philosophy

Contents

All the following are in flux and development:

1. Invitation to scientific philosophy – Start here.
2. The scientific method – The key to epistemology.
3. Philosophy of statistics – The details behind a justified epistemology.
4. Scientific realism – The key to metaphysics.
5. Naturalism – A metaphilosophy that says science should bootstrap philosophy.
6. Philosophy of mathematics – What is abstraction?
7. Philosophy of physics – What are good theories of the world?
8. Philosophy of mind – What is consciousness?
9. Ethics – What should we do?
10. The human condition – What are we?
11. Future studies – Where are we going?

Note: this is under construction

This site is my working draft of notes from philosophy papers I read. I share it here for collaborators and perhaps general interest (when I get it better organized). If you find any of it useful, please let me know, but please don’t distribute widely yet. I hope to pubish these outlines or some version of them on my blog: statisticalsignificance.net.

Note: scope disclaimer

While the scope of this project is ambitiously large, clearly it cannot pretend to represent all of philosophy by any stretch. This is a meandering of one person through his own thoughts on philosophy, a meandering that is primarily western and focused on empiricism, although not entirely either.

Also developing here

• Ryan’s philosophy reading list
• Ryan’s Minutes of Moving Naturalism Forward 2012