Freedom Within Necessity Suppose the compatibilist is faced with the following objection: human actions can’t be free because movements of the body are not free. More fully, if we consider the nature of bodily movements, we see that they have sufficient physiological causes and that from the point of view of […]
Falsehood and Meaning In a famous paper entitled “Truth and Meaning” Donald Davidson argues that meaning is constituted by truth conditions. A recursive theory of truth for a language in the style of Tarski is thus a theory of meaning for that language. Understanding a sentence consists in grasping its […]
External Conditions of Thought The idea of the singular proposition is that propositions can contain particulars as well as universals as their constituents. If I think that that bird is pretty, my thought’s content contains both a particular bird and the general property of being pretty. Thus a singular thought […]
Explanations of Life Suppose we encounter life forms on another planet unrelated to ours and possibly quite unlike ours. Still, there is evident adaptive complexity, so that the laws of physics and chance cannot explain what we observe. What possible explanation might be given for this complexity? How might […]
Existence and the Cogito The Cogito strikes most people as intuitively valid, but it has been trenchantly criticized. How exactly the inference is supposed to work still excites controversy. Here I will consider a line of objection that I have not seen pressed before. The natural way to interpret the […]
