John Bond James Bond died in 1966 when his helicopter crashed over Marrakesh on a dangerous mission. His left eyebrow went up slightly as the aircraft began its rapid descent, and he had only seconds in which to kiss goodbye the beautiful woman with whom he was conducting romantic espionage. He was 52 years old […]
AI Arms Race Mysterian politics avoids and deplores overconfident predictions. It rarely resorts to the speech act of assertion, preferring the conditional form, and uses the word “know” sparingly. But it has no objection to considering possibilities; indeed, it encourages the practice as an aid to thought and a device of precaution (it is fond […]
Politics and Mystery Everyone knows that universities are political places. Philosophy departments are political places too. This typically takes the form of competition for power and resources: what subjects are represented, who gets a job, who gets promoted, etc. Schools of thought are subject to academic politics (professorial power-grabs). Certain schools of thought acquire prominence […]
Philosophical Exaggeration I wish to put forward a meta-philosophy that I don’t like the sound of, not one bit. But I think it should be added to our menu of options; it is probably the most nihilistic view of philosophy ever invented, though it starts from innocuous observations. It is the view that traditional philosophy […]
Extraordinary Language Philosophy The legacy of commonsense philosophy and ordinary language philosophy is not dead.[1] It still haunts the precincts of academic philosophy. I wish to put on record my opposition to it (not that I hate everything about it, correctly understood). Taken literally, the idea of common sense is the idea of common sense—widespread, […]
The Miracle of Color Philosophers have spilt a lot of ink over color. It is indeed a very interesting phenomenon of nature. Since the seventeenth century it has been called a “secondary” quality, in contrast with the “primary” qualities germane to physics—a kind of second-class citizen in the grand republic of nature. But in some […]
Color and Consciousness What is the relationship between the problem of color and the problem of consciousness? Could they be fundamentally the same problem? It isn’t that consciousness is color, but that the problem of consciousness could be solved by solving the problem of color. Is the mystery basically the same? Consciousness of color is […]
Disappointment The Beatles were never disappointing. That’s why they are still with us and always will be. Each record was at least as good as the last and sometimes markedly superior. They couldn’t fail. John, Paul, George, and Ringo: they never disappointed. They dis-disappointed. They didn’t know the meaning of the word. But what about […]
