Is Neutral Monism Possible? My aims here are limited, as befits the topic. I will make some remarks about the proper formulation of neutral monism with a view to demonstrating its obscurity, not to say infeasibility. The thought is that we should seek a level of description of reality that is neutral between the mental […]
Memory and Knowledge What is the connection between memory and knowledge? To judge from the standard literature, very little—in a typical treatise on knowledge memory is hardly mentioned. I wish to urge a strong connection: all knowledge is memory knowledge. Memory enters into every instance of knowledge; all knowledge presupposes memory knowledge. That is, all […]
Trump is of course a massive liar, as last night’s debate demonstrated yet again, but everything about him is a lie: his hair, his skin, his fake success, his marriage, his accent, his teeth, his clothes. It is all deception from head to toe. He is a living lie. Nothing about him is real–except the […]
Phenomenological Behaviorism Could it be that there is an element of truth in behaviorism? Behaviorism is usually presented as a third-person view of the human mind—what we know of the mind by external observation. It often goes with a materialist metaphysics. It therefore naturally incurs the charge of ignoring the first-person perspective—of overlooking the mind’s […]
The Logical Form of Omission Sentences There is an undeniable appeal to Davidson’s treatment of action sentences, in which adverbs appear as predicates of events quantified over.[1] Thus “John buttered some toast quickly in the kitchen” becomes “There was an event esuch that e was a buttering and e was by John and e was quick and e was in the kitchen”. Events have properties […]
Epiphenomenal Facts Epiphenomenalism is the doctrine that mental facts (properties, events, states) are causally idle. When it seems as if mental facts are causing behavior it is really correlated neural facts that are doing the causing—electrical signals sent from the brain down the efferent nerves and into the muscles. This is taken to be a […]
Temporal Panpsychism In the interests of exploring every metaphysical option, I will consider the doctrine of temporal panpsychism. Several positions on time may be distinguished: materialism, idealism, functionalism, mysterianism, and panpsychism. Materialism says that time reduces to physical objects or processes: clocks, whether natural or man-made, or possibly physical processes such as entropy. Idealism says […]
Dualism Naturalized Traditional dualism is characterized by two theses: (a) the mind is a separate substance (object, entity) from the brain, and (b) the mind is immaterial. These are logically independent; in particular, (a) does not entail (b). The mind could be a separate physical substance from the brain, existing alongside it. Or neither could be physical, […]
