A portrait of yours truly, Michael Downey, drawn by my good friend David Smith (below), owner of Watermelon Studios. He’s an aspiring Manga artist currently in his final year of University studying animation and also an ardent musician. Go and pay his site a visit, request a commission for some art or just read some [...]

Filed under: English, Japan on January 30th, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Benkyo ni naru naa!
Akita International University (AIU) is only a small place, hidden away in the Tohoku region in Northern Japan, surrounded by mostly trees and fields. With a mere five or six hundred students, and with only several bus journeys a day to the main city, it has a certain feeling of isolation, but [...]

Filed under: English, Japan on January 27th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Just a short update today. Feel free to sample these Japanese songs - a few that jumped out at me from the Oricon 2007 top 100 singles chart. Also recommended is the Japanese drama (Jdrama) ‘First Kiss’ that aired last year over the summer. Hilarious and romantic, if slightly corny at times. Watching Jdramas is [...]

Filed under: English, Japan on January 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »

“What is your aim in Philosophy?”
“To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (Philosophical Investigations) - Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein thought that the pursuit of philosophy in its traditional sense is pointless. Philosophers who scoured far and wide for a structured logical form applicable to everything were deluded and wasting their time, much like a fly [...]

Filed under: English, Philosophy on January 21st, 2008 | No Comments »

Here I consider a couple of other responses to skepticism interesting in their own right. Both Externalist and Internalist responses also try to refute skepticism too.
The thing to note when thinking about contextualism is, in a way, it’s going outside the box to try and deal with skepticism. Recall the Closure argument for skepticism:
(P1) I [...]

Filed under: English, Philosophy on January 17th, 2008 | No Comments »