I’m reading Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics and figured I needed to write a road song (compare Route 66).   A Road Song I got my foot on the gas I got my hands on the wheel I’m heading down to Miami To seal the deal I’m a real estate broker If you really want to […]

Rejecting the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction  If we cannot make sense of the idea of a synthetic truth, it looks as if we have to reject the analytic-synthetic distinction (the reverse of post-Quine orthodoxy).[1] There is nothing coherent for the concept of analytic truth to contrast with (a genuine distinction requires meaningful things to be distinct). Yet […]

The recent debacle involving the presidents of three top American universities is symptomatic of a deeper and more widespread malaise. The moral obtuseness and intellectual ineptitude of these three women is just part of a general degradation in American universities and intellectual life. I won’t go into the causes of this, but what appalls me […]

Macro and Micro Necessity A curious fact of necessity studies: although necessity is liberally spoken of, its extent is rarely tabulated. We find reference to necessities involving people and items of furniture (and the occasional cat) but little in the way of mapping the full distribution of necessities in the world, or their interconnections. We […]