Art for Art’s Sake I am fed up to the back teeth with this slogan. It may have once seemed brave and insightful, but now it reveals a complete failure of moral judgment (and intelligence). It is the opposite of the truth. First, let’s parse it, because it conceals a slyly tendentious ambiguity. It clearly […]
Ana’s Friends I was struck by something Ana Navarro said in a recent interview. She was talking about her old friends in the Republican party: Marco Rubio, Lindsay Graham, Pam Bondi, and others. She emphasized that she had known these people for many years and counted them as good friends. Lindsay Graham went back to […]
Cognitive Closure Generalized Transcendental naturalism (TN) is the idea that nature naturally transcends our ability naturally to know about it. Ignorance is real and natural—a biological fact.[1] Cognitive closure (CC) is the fact of being cut off from nature cognitively; not all of it, to be sure, but some of it. TN is a metaphysical […]
Description, Analysis, Explanation, and Philosophy I invite you to indulge with me in some loose reflections on the nature of philosophy. There will be no test or harsh judgment. We are doing this as friends at a kind of philosopher’s party. We can take the brakes off for a while. There are three kinds of […]
Universal Prescriptivism It used to be held that there are two types of speech act: descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive speech acts state facts; prescriptive speech acts recommend acts. The fact-act dichotomy underlies the description-prescription dichotomy. I think this is completely wrong: there is no such thing as a descriptive speech act in the intended sense, […]
Body Mentalism We are all too familiar with attempts to describe the mind in terms of the body, the better to integrate the two. Behaviorism and materialism spring to mind (in both senses). These attempts are seldom if ever convincing, at first glance or after many glances. They seem to put the mind where it […]
Physicalisms The word “physicalism” covers a multitude of sins: it is vague, honorific, and deeply mysterious. What does it mean? Don’t say it means “what physicists do”—that is completely circular and uninformative. Also, physics varies from one physicist to another: whose physics do we mean? Do we mean Descartes’ physics, centering around the notions of […]
