Existentialism and Essentialism The existentialist credo is: Existence precedes essence.[1] This stands opposed to the dictum: Essence precedes existence. It’s Sartre versus the Scholastics, supposedly. Sartre’s existentialism, deriving from Kierkegaard and Heidegger, is said to invert traditional metaphysics, which takes the nature of a thing to be prior to its existence—or at […]
[1] This paper is a follow-up to my “Attributes of Mind”. I find it strange that people pay lip service to Brentano without making much effort to find out exactly what he held. And it is far more challenging and momentous than the usual anodyne versions of it suggest (of course the mind is about […]
Intentionality and Space Here is a famous passage from Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874): “Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction […]
Acquaintance Knowledge There are some things that can only be known by acquaintance, i.e. by “direct experience”. If you want to know what red is, it’s no use having it described to you; you have to experience it for yourself. Such knowledge is not propositional: it is knowledge concerning a thing (what […]
[1] My ulterior purpose here is to defend traditional philosophical theorizing from misguided objections stemming from the impossibility of completing a classic conceptual analysis. Gettier didn’t show that the whole project of a priori analysis (we can still use that word) is pointless; rather, he showed (arguably) that a certain conception of analysis can’t be […]
Is Knowledge True Justified Belief? Yes, despite the counterexamples. It is fair to say that before Gettier’s paper the TJB analysis of knowledge was the accepted theory. The theory was not regarded as a work in progress, as somehow incomplete, or vulnerable to counterexample. If not self-evidently correct, it was taken to […]
Attributes of Mind Three attributes of mind stand out: intentionality, subjectivity, and privacy. The mind is essentially about something; the mind is accessible only from a certain point of view; the mind is known directly only by its subject. I take it these attributes are familiar and I won’t elaborate on them […]
Intentionality and Psychologism Brentano’s thesis is that every mental phenomenon is directed to an Object distinct from itself.[1] It has an extra-mental correlate—the thing thought about or perceived or desired or loved or hated, etc. This entity may or may not exist (but I will ignore the latter case from now on). […]
