Complete and Incomplete Grammar books routinely inform their readers that a sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought. The idea is that some groups of words fail to express complete thoughts and hence are not sentences. Do they then express incomplete thoughts? Are we […]
What is Remembering? Not much philosophical attention has been paid to the concept of remembering, in contrast to perceiving and communicating (as well as thinking, reasoning, knowing, believing, imagining, willing, intending, acting, feeling, consciousness, and other concepts). How should remembering be conceived? Nabokov entitled his autobiography […]
Russell’s Paradox Made Easy [1] Consider the set of all men: its members are men, though it is not itself a man but a set. Most sets are like this: they don’t have sets as members, but ordinary things—flowers, bees, motorcars. (Some sets do have sets as members, such as […]
Agnosticism and Skepticism Consider a tribe of natural-born agnostics concerning the existence of the external world. This tribe regards it as plain common sense that they do not know whether there are any external objects. They have no inclination to believe in external objects, but neither do they disbelieve in […]
I Am Not a Person There is no person with whom I am identical, though there are persons. I am not Colin McGinn (if “Colin McGinn” names a person). Why do I say that about myself? Why do I say that no one referred to by “I” is […]
One Substance Spinoza’s view that there is just one substance is immensely attractive, but can we give any argument for it? How do we rule out many-substance views? We are accustomed to considering dual substance views such as Descartes’ dualism of mind and matter, but these don’t exhaust the field. […]
Food and Philosophy Are there any hitherto undiscovered branches of philosophy? There must have been a time when no branches of philosophy had been discovered, back in prehistory, and then gradually the field formed and spread itself. Now we have numerous fields and sub-fields of philosophical enquiry, from […]
Existence and Action The word “action” has both a narrow and a wide interpretation: in the narrow sense it means human (or animal) intentional action (OED “the process of doing something to achieve an aim”); in the wide sense it includes actions of inanimate objects (OED “the effect or influence […]
Degrees of Knowledge Belief comes in degrees—one can believe something more or less strongly. But knowledge does not come in degrees—one cannot know something more or less strongly. We have all sorts of words for degrees of belief (“certain”, “confident”, “convinced”, “of the opinion that”, “suspect”, “surmise”), but we have no such […]
Consciousness and Synthesis How does conscious intentionality differ from the unconscious kind? How does the intentionality of our conscious thoughts, in particular, differ from such unconscious representations as there might be? Even if there is no real intentionality of the latter kind, but only derivative intentionality or quasi-intentionality, we can still […]