Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk Mr. Spock feels no emotion; Captain Kirk overflows with it. Spock coldly calculates; Kirk passionately emotes. Spock has no sense of humor and never smiles; Kirk enjoys a joke and smiles frequently. Kirk loves, not so Spock. Do they understand each other? It seems clear that […]
Are Reasons Causes? It used to be held in the 1950s that reasons are not causes (the “logical connection” argument), but the tide turned in the 1960s. The new orthodoxy was that rational explanation of actions is a species of causal explanation: beliefs and desires are the causes of action.[1] True, […]
Perception, Thought, and Language I will reflect loosely (though not I hope sloppily) on some very general properties of the items listed in the title, with special emphasis on their interrelations. There has been a tendency to assimilate these three things, as if they are all variations on a single theme. Empiricism […]
Heat, Color, Shape, and Taste Galileo’s 1623 discussion of heat and related matters bears revisiting.[1] In it he formulates with particular clarity what later came to be called the primary and secondary quality distinction, using it to address the question of whether motion is the cause of heat. He begins by saying […]
Existential Beliefs It is generally assumed in philosophy that we have a great many existential beliefs. We believe that objects in the external world exist, that other people exist, that we ourselves exist, that mental states exist, that space and time exist, etc. Maybe not everyone believes that atoms and numbers exist […]
Skepticism and Self-Knowledge From the point of view of skepticism, self-knowledge is an anomaly. How is it that facts about a person’s psychology can be known with certainty when everything else is uncertain? It’s not as if first-person ascriptions of mental states are analytic or a priori; they report the same […]
Evolution and the Self We must assume that the self evolved, given that it exists and is not a social construct. That means it arose by mutation and natural selection, serving some biological purpose. And not just in humans but also across the animal kingdom: all those animal selves are biological adaptations, […]
