A Private World We live in a mixed world: partly public, partly private. There are public perceptible states of affairs and there are private imperceptible states of affairs—for example, rocks and animals, on the one hand, and thoughts and sensations, on the other. You can see the color of your cat’s eyes […]
[3] It may be that the organism-centered view of evolution is a holdover from religious views of the origin of life. If we think of God as our creator, we naturally picture him as especially concerned with our welfare, particularly our life and death. By extension, then, we imagine him concerned with the individual lives […]
Survival of the Fittest What is it that survives and possesses fitness? The organism, of course: natural selection favors organisms that survive longer than other organisms—they are the ones with a greater chance of reproducing themselves. And the fitter the organism is the greater its chances of survival to reproductive maturity. Evolution […]
Ontological Inconvenience The order of ontology is not the same as the order of epistemology. In fact they are inversions of each other. What is ontologically basic is not epistemologically basic and vice versa. Let’s divide reality into three levels: elementary objects, middle sized objects, and sentient objects: the first level constitutes […]
Humbert’s Love Chapter 29 of Lolita contains two declarations of love: Humbert’s love for Lolita (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller) and Lolita’s love for Quilty. Neither declaration is predictable. I have discussed Lolita’s declaration elsewhere (“Lolita and Quilty”), noting its prima facie implausibility: Quilty is very far from meriting this love and has […]
The Concept of Language What is language? What does the word “language” mean? What does it refer to? We can distinguish two sorts of answer: performance-centered and competence-centered. Alternatively, utterance-centered and cognition-centered: answers that stress the actual use of language in speech and answers that focus on the internal mechanisms and structures that […]
Human Uniqueness The recent discovery of yet another extinct hominid species (Homo longi) raises a deeply puzzling question: Why are we still here? Evidently there were a number of hominid species co-existing with us on the planet only a few hundred thousand years ago, but now there is only Homo sapiens left. All […]
Mysticism and Philosophy The word “mysticism” has a variety of meanings, but the one of interest to us now is “vague or ill defined religious or spiritual belief, especially as associated with a belief in the occult” (OED). This definition itself contains some vague or ill-defined words, notably “religious”, “spiritual”, and “occult”. […]
This footnote belongs at the end of the paper just posted. [1] Possibly a more intimate acquaintance with universals would lessen the mystical impact of Plato’s theory, by which Russell was clearly affected. The aura of the mystical and supernatural might not survive an up-close look at these elusive creatures. Ignorance tends to breed superstition. […]
Thinking About Universals In chapter IX of The Problems of Philosophy (1912) Russell makes a good case for the existence of universals in a roughly platonic sense. He ends with these stirring words: “The world of universals, therefore, may also be described as the world of being. The world of being is […]