Is Moral Responsibility Logically Possible? There is a well-known argument purporting to show that human beings are not morally responsible, i.e. appropriate recipients of praise and blame, which goes as follows. [1] What you do results from the way you are—your psychology. But the way you are is fixed by heredity […]
Is Descriptive Metaphysics Possible? Strawson draws his famous distinction between two types of metaphysics in these words: “Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure”. This formulation raises puzzling questions. One might have […]
Introspective Invariance Our knowledge of the external world is subject to much variation in type and degree of access. We don’t always perceive accurately or clearly or with the same amount of revelation. There are illusions, occlusions, blurring, darkness, variations in appearance, constancy effects, blindness (partial or total), stimulus overload, perspectival […]
Interrogative Closure Nearly thirty years ago I coined the phrase “cognitive closure” to mean “things that can’t be known”. I now want to introduce the phrase “interrogative closure” to mean “questions that can’t be asked”—to be contrasted with “affirmative closure” meaning “answers that can’t be given”. Just as there may […]
Innate Blank Slates Even the most hardline nativist will agree that not everything that passes before the mind, or exists in it, is innately fixed. In particular, memory contains contents that derive from experience. Memory may be defined as the ability to learn, and animals with memory absorb information from […]
Injustice Injustice directed towards an individual creates a specific psychological response. This response includes anger at the perpetrator, moral indignation, resentment, a sense of futility, a desire for revenge, disillusionment, and general malaise. It can shape a person’s entire life, and destroy his or her wellbeing permanently. The injustice can be of […]
Inhuman Philosophy Has philosophy become inhuman? Is that why it has lost its prestige and popularity? Is it doomed by its inhumanness? Or is it perhaps not inhuman enough? Is it just not scientific, merely a parade of personal opinion and undisciplined subjectivity? Must we reunite philosophy with the humanities […]
Infinite Metaphysics “To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.” (William Blake) As Spinoza noted, we must not let metaphysics be shaped by the human perspective; we must […]
Impressions of Existence You wake up in the morning and you become conscious of the world again. For a while nothing existed for you, but now existence floods back. You become aware of external objects, of space, of time, of yourself, of your mental states. I shall say that you […]
Hume, Wittgenstein, and Kripke In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume writes as follows: “It must certainly be allowed, that nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals […]