Wei_Dai comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - Less Wrong

27 Post author: lukeprog 29 November 2012 09:00PM

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Comment author: gwern 01 December 2012 08:37:22PM 1 point [-]

They're still citations to his body of work, which is all on pretty much the same topic. SEP is good, but it is just an encyclopedia, after all, and Being No One is a very challenging book (I still haven't read it because it's too hard for me). A general citation search would be more useful; I see 647 citations to it in Google Scholar. (I don't know of a citation engine specializing in philosophy - Philpapers shows a fair bit of activity related to Metzinger but doesn't give me how many philosophy papers cite it, much less philosophy of mind.)

Comment author: Wei_Dai 01 December 2012 08:57:38PM 1 point [-]

I didn't even try to read the book, but went through a bunch of review papers (which of course all try to summarize the main ideas of the book) and feel like I got a general understanding that way. I wanted to see how his ideas compare to his peers (so as to judge how much of an advance they are upon the state of the art), and that's when I found the SEP lacking any discussion of them (which still seems fairly damning to me).