Song and Soul   It is a truism that song touches the soul. Something about song and something about the soul naturally mesh: that is, song and the emotions are suited to one another. But why is this? What features suit song to the emotions and hence the soul? Song is clearly language […]

    An Objectivist View of the Universe   I will describe a metaphysical view aptly labeled objectivist. My aim is expository rather than argumentative, though I am inclined to accept the view. Objectivism says that the universe (reality, being) is fundamentally objective not subjective, with the emphasis on “fundamentally”. It isn’t that the universe […]

  On Not Denoting   The literature on descriptions tends to operate with a limited class of examples, mainly descriptions of people and places (“the queen of England”, “the capital of France”). This can bias us in favor of certain theories of their semantics. We can think of descriptions as referring to people and places […]

     Sexuality and the Transsexual   Consider a person, Alec, who believes he was born into the wrong kind of body. He believes himself to be essentially female, despite his anatomy. Accordingly, he chooses to become the woman he inwardly perceives himself to be: he dresses in women’s clothes, wears make-up, and acts the […]