Wimbledon and Me I had always been a one-handed player, forehand and backhand. Occasionally I would try a two-handed backhand and find it awkward and unnatural. But my neck operation in March changed all of this: it left my right arm impaired, causing me to lose power, mobility, and control. I was assured it would […]
Mass and Consciousness In “The Mysteries of Mass” Jorge Cham and Daniel Whitestone write as follows: “We have many descriptions of mass but very little understanding of what it is and why we have it. We all feel mass. As a baby, you develop that sense that some things are harder to push around than […]
Tranquility Ethics What constitutes the good life? According to ethical hedonism, the good life is the life of pleasure. But what is it about pleasure that makes it conducive to the good life? Is it pleasure’s inherent phenomenology or is it something to which pleasure gives rise? Is it the way pleasure feels or is […]
Perceiving Two positions have dominated the philosophy of perception: naïve realism and the sense-datum theory. Either we see material objects “directly” or we see only sense-data. I will describe a hybrid theory according to which the objects of perception are indeed material particulars located at some distance away in space but the properties we see […]
Impersonal Identity We normally think that bodily survival depends upon identity through time. The body of an animal may change over time, but the body remains one and the same through these changes; the animal doesn’t acquire a numerically distinct body as it goes through life. Even in death the body remains one and the […]
Subjects and Persons Are persons and subjects identical? Both these concepts are hard to define, but we can fix ideas by saying that subjects are centers of consciousness and persons are constituted by memories, personality traits, and mental and physical capacities. Elsewhere I have given an argument showing that they are not identical, […]
