Our Knowledge of Other Minds       How do we know the contents of other people’s minds? By what method do we know about other minds? The options are the following: by sense perception, by inference, by introspection, and by a priori reasoning (I exclude telepathy, at least as the standard […]

                                                  Mysticism and Matter     Consider a community of disembodied minds cut off from material reality. Not only are they immaterial themselves, they have no contact with matter, not even space. Their perceptions are purely abstract and psychological. They communicate with each other about things that interest them, but there is no talk […]

                                                 Knowledge of One’s Own Existence     Alice dropped the fan “just in time to avoid shrinking away altogether. ‘That was a narrow escape!’ said Alice, a good deal frightened at the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence”(Alice in Wonderland, p. 23). There is […]

    The Word “Is”     The standard view is that “is” is ambiguous between the “is” of predication and the “is” of identity (we might also add the “is” of composition, as in “this statue is bronze”). Thus we have, “the cup is red” and “Hesperus is Phosphorus”, where the two occurrences of […]