What the Mind Does: Internalization and Externalization The concepts of internalization and externalization are found with some frequency in psychology. It is said that the child internalizes the surrounding culture, including moral and social norms (the same can be said of an adult transplanted into a hitherto alien culture). It […]
What is it like to be a Human? Imagine an intelligent bat contemplating the mind-body problem, name of Tim Nigel. [1] Nigel has noticed that humans have an auditory sense not possessed by bats (of his species): they can hear various pitches. This enables them to appreciate music (unlike Tim and his conspecifics) and […]
Varieties of Sanity Mental illness comes in several varieties: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, neurosis, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoia, impulse control disorder, tic disorder, sexual disorders. These illnesses can be possessed independently (though there are certain correlations): you can have one without having the others. I […]
Truth-Value Gaps and Meaning Sentences exhibiting truth-value gaps would appear to pose a significant problem for truth-conditional semantics. Such sentences evidently have meaning, yet they are neither true nor false. In this respect they resemble non-indicative sentences such as imperatives. But imperatives can be handled by adopting a parallel concept like […]
The Uniformity of Evil Evil comes in many varieties. A typical list would include: genocide, murder, torture, terrorism, slavery, sadism, the sexual and physical abuse of children, slander, betrayal of trust, desecration of the sacred, disfiguring, maiming, and crippling. We might count as evil the willful destruction of great […]
The Structure of Moral Thinking How do we actually think when we think morally? What is the psychological reality of reasoning about moral questions? How do we arrive at moral knowledge? I propose to answer this question by considering an imaginary example designed to separate out the several components of moral […]
The Sermon on the Mount Is there any evidence of Jesus’ divinity in the passages known as the Sermon on the Mount? If his moral teachings reflected some kind of divine infallibility, we would expect these teachings to express the most advanced morality possible. We would expect Jesus to be […]
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 […]