Soiled, Torn, Dead Chapter 7, Part II, of Lolita is an extraordinarily powerful piece of writing, even by the standards of that work. This is the chapter that begins: “I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals”. In this chapter Humbert Humbert describes how […]
Metaphysical Pluralism I will discuss a question at the outer edge of human comprehension. Some metaphysical views are monist, some dualist, and some pluralist. Monist views include materialism and idealism; dualist views typically divide reality into the mental and the material; and pluralist views include a variety of disparate types of being. […]
A Paradox of Democracy A democratic state could decide democratically to abolish democracy. The people have come to the conclusion the democracy is dysfunctional, tyrannical (of the majority), and inefficient, so they vote to replace it with something better. According to democracy, they have a right to do that, and indeed a duty. Not […]
Potentiality Potentiality is not the same as possibility. Potentiality is a kind of power or capacity; possibility is a way things could be. Someone might have the potential to become a concert pianist but this might not actually be a possibility because of circumstances (no pianos to practice on, no teachers, etc.). And […]
Puzzles of the Unconscious When was the unconscious mind discovered? The question makes sense in a way the comparable question about the conscious mind does not. The conscious mind was “discovered” when it came to exist, just by being conscious: being conscious and knowing one is conscious are inseparable. But that isn’t true […]
A Linguistic Universal We are familiar with claims of linguistic universality: the noun-verb form, recursive embedding, quantificational structure, adverbial modification, discrete infinity, and the like. I want to add a different kind of linguistic universal, one that is less syntactic than semantic: I call it “material plurality”. A natural language like English […]
