Hand Work I just had occasion to revisit my 2014 book Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity (it is the topic of episode 8 of the long-form interview I am recording with my Turkish collaborators). I found myself rather impressed by it. It is really a science book with some philosophy thrown in. […]
Solipsistic Realism Berkeley had a metaphysics and epistemology that dispensed with matter; he thought this gave us a better theory of the nature of objects and also delivered us from the skepticism generated by the idea of matter. But he was not a solipsist, not by any means: he believed in multiple “finite spirits” and […]
A Disproof of Other Minds We can’t prove the existence of other minds, but can we disprove their existence? Can we construct a plausible argument that other minds don’t exist, only one’s own mind does (solipsism)? That sounds improbable and I don’t know of any attempt to do it, but philosophy is full of surprising […]
Concepts of the Physical World Here is an eloquent passage from Thomas Nagel: “The understanding of the physical world has been expanded enormously with the aid of theories and explanations that use concepts not tied to the specifically human perceptual viewpoint. Our senses provide the evidence from which we start, but the detached character of […]
Bertie’s Vocabulary I was in the mood for a Jeeves and Wooster, so I gulped down (as Bertie might say) a tale of these two coves (viz. The Inimitable Jeeves). A large part of what makes these books so amusing is Bertie’s vocabulary (as contrasted with Jeeves’s). I found myself underlining the many words he […]
Davidson at the Orange Bowl Yesterday I was over at the Biltmore watching the first rounds of the Junior Orange Bowl tennis tournament (14 and under). I couldn’t hit at the wall there because of the tournament. These kids are amazing—I couldn’t get a point off them. I sat contentedly on the bleachers with the […]
Colin, When I compare the blog writings with your books, a natural difference in level becomes clear. Your books have tight argumentation and technical density; the blog, by contrast, is deliberately freer, faster, and more polemical. This is not a weakness but a difference of genre. As I plan to organize the blog texts into […]
