Proprioception and Naïve Realism Philosophical discussions of sense perception seldom address proprioception, but it is a question whether theories that hold for the other senses, particularly vision, hold for proprioception. The objects of proprioception are generally taken to be the muscles and joints, possibly also the skin; they do not […]
Problems of Other Minds We speak of the problem of other minds, in the singular, but it is instructive to disentangle different strands in what is so described. Does the difficulty of knowing other minds stem from the nature of mind or from the contingent limits of our faculties […]
Pointless Knowledge God is said to be omniscient: he knows everything. There is nothing he doesn’t know, no matter how minor or inconsequential. I think this poses a problem for God’s existence, because some knowledge is pointless—and nothing about God should be pointless. It is sometimes noted that God knows about little […]
Plurality and the Big Bang It is said that the big bang created space and time—they did not exist beforehand. Thus something existed (a “singularity”) before space and time existed; and it was some sort of empirical particular not an abstract entity. It is generally conceived as superhot […]
Platonic Pragmatism The pragmatic theory of truth has this going for it: it recognizes that truth is something with value. Truth is something we ought to pursue and hence has a normative aspect. It is good to believe what is true and bad to believe what is false. Truth […]
Physics and the Physical It sounds reasonable—indeed tautological–to say that physics is about the physical, as psychology is about the psychological. But that is not clearly true. Consider Newton’s physics: it includes not only physical things in the ordinary sense but also space and time—as well as gravitational force. That […]
Philosophy Defined It is an embarrassment to philosophers that they cannot define their discipline. It makes them look like shady operators. I propose to alleviate their embarrassment by offering a succinct definition of philosophy. If you ask a physicist what physics is about, he will say that it is […]
Philosophy as Biology In the 1960s linguistics took a biological turn with the work of Lenneberg and Chomsky. [1] Language was held to be genetically fixed, a species universal, just like the anatomy of the body. It is a biological aspect of human beings, not something cultural or learned, more like […]
Philosophical Economics Economics tells us that an economic transaction involves the sale (or exchange) of “goods and services”. This phrase invites conceptual scrutiny. It is notable that an evaluative term is used to describe the commodities sold: goods are good. [1] Services also are inherently valuable: you don’t perform someone the […]
Phenomenological Ignorance We can’t know what it’s like to be a bat. This is an instance of a more general truth: no one can grasp the nature of experiences that are radically different from their own. We can grasp the nature of experiences similar to our own, but we can’t […]