Sexual Knowledge In endnote [A] to An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume asks: “I should desire to know, what can be meant by asserting, that self-love, or resentment of injuries, or the passion between the sexes is not innate?” He clearly thinks that these “ideas” (Locke’s term) are innate, so […]
Selfish Genes and Selfish Beasts It is sometimes supposed that selfish gene theory implies that animals are always biologically selfish—that all animals carry “genes for selfishness”. That is a misunderstanding because the whole point of the theory is to allow for kin-related altruism: an animal will act against its own […]
Seeing Sensations It has been generally accepted that you can’t know what a sensation is like without experiencing it yourself. No experience of pain, no understanding of pain; no seeing of red, no knowing what seeing of red is. Possessing the concept requires instantiating what it is a concept of. […]
Remarks on Metaphysics What kind of statement expresses the results of metaphysical inquiry? Wittgenstein famously begins the Tractatusthus: “The world is all that is the case” (1), “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (1.1.), “The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all […]
Proprioception and Naïve Realism Philosophical discussions of sense perception seldom address proprioception, but it is a question whether theories that hold for the other senses, particularly vision, hold for proprioception. The objects of proprioception are generally taken to be the muscles and joints, possibly also the skin; they do not […]
