Identity of Selves It is plausibly urged that there can be no identity without identity conditions (“criteria”): for example, material objects are identical in virtue of being spatiotemporally coincident, or sets are identical if and only if they share their members. Likewise, we could say that distinctness requires conditions (“criteria”) of distinctness: no two […]
Right and Ought: Schopenhauer on Kant In The Basis of Morality Schopenhauer undertakes a wholesale critique of Kant’s moral philosophy. He begins by attacking the very idea of a categorical imperative: morality should not be conceived as consisting of imperatives at all; the concept of the “moral law” is defective; moral rightness […]
Language and the Cave In Plato’s cave the inhabitants see nothing but shadows. Shadows are etiolated compared to the objects that cast them. You can glean very little from a shadow about the object that casts it. The shadow is two-dimensional, colorless, massless, and without texture: it is merely an absence of light, […]
A Modal Argument from Evil Some worlds are more evil than ours: we don’t live in the worst of all possible worlds. Some are a lot worse than ours: only the wicked prosper, disease is rampant and deadly, virtue leads to imprisonment, people are executed for singing in public, deep depression is the […]
The Frog Crawl The kick in swimming the crawl adds little to forward momentum, maybe ten or fifteen percent of the power. All the power comes from the arms. In the breaststroke the frog-like movement of the legs adds much more to propulsion, about forty percent I would estimate. The arms have less […]
