George and Me I was just talking to my good friend George Stephanopoulos about Los Angeles. He has recently been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to broadcasting. I was a visiting professor at UCLA for two semesters in 1979 and at USC in 1983 and thoroughly enjoyed the […]
Love Tennis Yesterday I went to Salvador tennis center to play with my good friends Eddie and Rob. It was 4pm and not too hot. We alternated hitting two against one (not points, just hitting). Then Claudio showed up unexpectedly (he had been very busy in his restaurant recently, so we hadn’t seen much of […]
Hate Again I hate Trump. I hate everything about him. I hate the people surrounding him. I despise, detest, and deplore these people. I hope they receive their proper comeuppance. I never thought I would feel this way about politicians in America, and therefore (some) Americans. I didn’t know the depths of my capacity for […]
Space, Time, and Reality Metaphysically speaking, there are basically two kinds of fact: structural and dynamic, spatial and temporal. These are what nature is made of. Geometry deals with structure; physics (the science of motion) deals with dynamics. How they are related is a difficult question, but they are clearly real and fundamental. There is […]
This is a letter from Robert Kuhn, creator of Closer to Truth, in which he shows no hesitation about the proposed series. Would that the American philosophy profession could be similarly disposed! Their loss. As I think I mentioned briefly several months ago, I would like to produce a comprehensive CTT video series dedicated entirely […]
Phenomenological Behaviorism It wasn’t a bad idea to say that behavior belongs at the center of psychology. But what kind of behavior? The concept is not pellucid, as to intension or extension. Here are some synonyms: action, act, performance, response, reaction, deed, thing done, operation, conduct, deportment, movement. In psychology the term is generally used […]
Mental Ontology and the Identity Theory The identity theory, type or token, has always sounded funny—that was its charm, its novelty. It wasn’t that we had discovered the identity by ordinary scientific means; it was a philosopher’s conceit, an audacious hypothesis. Neurophysiologists never talked this way; they limited themselves to assertions of correlation (vague, non-committal). […]
Materialism as Metaphor I think materialism is at best false and at worst meaningless. But I won’t defend these opinions here (I have elsewhere, as have others[1]). I am here to praise materialism not to bury it. If I may descend to the demotic, my view is that materialism is crap, but it is good […]
