Inscrutable Mental Causation It is a matter of common observation that the sun causes plants to grow. Our ancestors will have noticed this long ago and wondered why it is. The answer is by no means obvious. Maybe it’s because the sun is a god and he commands plants to grow; maybe […]
Implicit Quotation In ordinary writing people are not fussy about quotation marks. A printed sentence may read, “The word red has three letters”. Logicians and philosophers of language may shudder at such violations of the rules of use and mention, but most people take them in stride. It […]
Immaterial Darwinism Consider the following imaginary world (I say “imaginary” not “possible” because I doubt this world is really metaphysically possible). There is a range of disembodied minds divided into different kinds in this world, analogous to animal species, numbering in the millions. There are also differences among the individuals […]
Identity and Difference Identity has been found problematic; difference, not so much. Identity has been judged a pseudo relation, but no one doubts that difference is a genuine relation between things. We can observe that one thing is different from another, but can we observe that a thing is identical […]
I’m Free Philosophy has saddled itself with the phrase “free will”, asking such questions as whether free will is possible, whether it is compatible with determinism (and indeterminism), and what its nature is. Is it conceivable that the phrase itself is responsible for the seeming intractability of the problem? Consider the […]
Good, Evil, and War It is easy to see how two evil states may go to war. They may have conflicting interests that they seek to settle by means of organized violence: for instance, they may have designs on each other’s territory or wealth. It is also […]
Formal Languages and Natural Languages Philosophers of language have argued over the relationship between so-called formal languages and natural languages (the kind people regularly speak). Some say formal languages supply the underlying logical form of the sentences of natural languages; some say formal languages improve on natural languages; some […]
Forced Knowledge We are schooled in various dichotomies dividing up the field of human knowledge: a priori versus a posterioriknowledge, infallible versus fallible knowledge, implicit versus explicit knowledge, innate versus acquired knowledge, basic versus derived knowledge, and so on. These are all worthy of the attention of the […]
Footnotes to Plato “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” This remark from Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Pt. II, ch. 1, sec. 1) is frequently cited, either as a tribute to Plato’s greatness or as an […]
Extended Anatomy It is customary to distinguish between an organism’s body and its environment. The environment is what exists outside the body. There is a definite boundary between the two. But how solid is this distinction? And does it matter to theoretical biology? Might there be a better way to carve things […]