The Problem of Deduction The problem of deduction can be stated as follows: in virtue of what does one proposition logically necessitate another proposition? Propositions have logical powers of entailment, but what is the nature of those powers? Compare Hume’s question: what is the nature of causal power? Events necessitate other […]
The Non-Existence of Lolita The novel Lolita takes for granted the existence of Lolita—or does it? Is she real? There is no doubt that Dolores Haze, a twelve-year-old American schoolgirl, is real: but is Lolita real? To answer this question we must first investigate the category of the nymphet: […]
The Nature of Things Long ago there lived a pre-Socratic philosopher named Kryptos. Kryptos was interested in change and he had noticed an interesting fact about change: some changes leave an object in existence while other changes put an object out of existence. If you bend a stick or move it […]
The Mystery of Color How does color come into the world? Not color experience but color itself—the color properties of objects. How do things come to be red, say? Not by virtue of their intrinsic objective properties, since things are not intrinsically and objectively colored. Shape properties (among others) come […]
The Murder of Quilty The enthralled and stricken reader of Lolita reaches chapter 35 of the book, the penultimate chapter, in a tragic state of mind, weeping hot tears. This is the chapter in which Clare Quilty is brutally murdered by a drunk and deranged Humbert Humbert. Yet the chapter […]
The Moral Mind What goes on in a person’s mind when he or she makes a moral judgment and acts on it? It is an interesting fact that this question is hard to answer. If we ask what goes on in a person’s mind when she makes a judgment […]
The Meaning of Realism The task of saying what realism is is not a trivial one. We need an account that generalizes across all areas in which philosophers have found it natural to speak of realism and anti-realism. So the account must be abstract and topic-neutral not restricted to […]
The Freedom Machine It is often supposed that psychological determinism is incompatible with freedom. The more a desire compels an action the less free that action is. The more we can predict a person’s actions from his desires the less free that person is. Liberation from desire is thus […]
The Bundle Theory of Belief We have a tendency to suppose that beliefs are discrete states of mind, cleanly separated from each other. They exist like so many peas in a pod or sentences printed on a page. But this is not a realistic picture: beliefs come in groups. The […]
The Anti-Ontological Argument The ontological argument proceeds from the premise that God contains all perfections to the conclusion that God exists. The anti-ontological argument proceeds from the premise that God contains all perfections to the conclusion that God does not exist. It thus precisely reverses the traditional argument deriving from Anselm. [1] […]