Good, Evil, and War     It is easy to see how two evil states may go to war. They may have conflicting interests that they seek to settle by means of organized violence: for instance, they may have designs on each other’s territory or wealth. It is also […]

                                                      Forced Knowledge       We are schooled in various dichotomies dividing up the field of human knowledge: a priori versus a posterioriknowledge, infallible versus fallible knowledge, implicit versus explicit knowledge, innate versus acquired knowledge, basic versus derived knowledge, and so on. These are all worthy of the attention of the […]

                                                Extended Anatomy     It is customary to distinguish between an organism’s body and its environment. The environment is what exists outside the body. There is a definite boundary between the two. But how solid is this distinction? And does it matter to theoretical biology?  Might there be a better way to carve things […]

                                          Essentially Negative Concepts     Negation is a basic and ubiquitous element of our conceptual scheme, though it is hard to say anything illuminating about it. Beyond noting that it is a unary truth function we find little to report about the nature of negation. We feel vaguely that it consists in a […]