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 […]
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 […]