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] […]
The Alleged Limits of Moral Philosophy Bernard Williams wrote a book entitled Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. [1] This title invites interrogation. What kind of limitation might be meant? We can all agree that philosophy is limited in some way: it cannot do what science does, for example, or history […]
Strengths of Realism Realism and anti-realism are conventionally presented as dichotomous: you must be either one or the other with nothing in between. This is supposed true across the board, from material objects to moral values. But on reflection the dichotomy is too simple—there are finer distinctions to capture. We can […]
Speechless Language Normally when a human being learns a language he or she learns to speak and be spoken to. Sounds are produced and understood. An acoustic ability is acquired. But this is not always so: some people learn language (e.g. the English language) without the aid of sound. They neither […]