Innate Blank Slates Even the most hardline nativist will agree that not everything that passes before the mind, or exists in it, is innately fixed. In particular, memory contains contents that derive from experience. Memory may be defined as the ability to learn, and animals with memory absorb information from […]
Injustice Injustice directed towards an individual creates a specific psychological response. This response includes anger at the perpetrator, moral indignation, resentment, a sense of futility, a desire for revenge, disillusionment, and general malaise. It can shape a person’s entire life, and destroy his or her wellbeing permanently. The injustice can be of […]
Inhuman Philosophy Has philosophy become inhuman? Is that why it has lost its prestige and popularity? Is it doomed by its inhumanness? Or is it perhaps not inhuman enough? Is it just not scientific, merely a parade of personal opinion and undisciplined subjectivity? Must we reunite philosophy with the humanities […]
Infinite Metaphysics “To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.” (William Blake) As Spinoza noted, we must not let metaphysics be shaped by the human perspective; we must […]
Impressions of Existence You wake up in the morning and you become conscious of the world again. For a while nothing existed for you, but now existence floods back. You become aware of external objects, of space, of time, of yourself, of your mental states. I shall say that you […]
Hume, Wittgenstein, and Kripke In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume writes as follows: “It must certainly be allowed, that nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals […]
Human Contingency There are two views about the existence of humans on this planet: one view says that human existence was inevitable, a natural culmination, just a matter of time; the other view says that human existence is an accident, an unpredictable anomaly, just a matter of luck (I am […]
How Mysterious? We distinguish problems and mysteries: questions that we can in principle answer and questions that exceed our cognitive capacities. It is natural to interpret this distinction ontologically: some things are mysterious while others are merely problematic. The world divides up into entities that are mysterious and entities that […]
Good Works, Bad People What should we do about people who do bad things but produce good works of art? What about a child-molesting composer, say? Should his works be banned? The question is not simple and I shall work up to an answer by considering some thought experiments. Suppose […]
Freedom Within Necessity Suppose the compatibilist is faced with the following objection: human actions can’t be free because movements of the body are not free. More fully, if we consider the nature of bodily movements, we see that they have sufficient physiological causes and that from the point of view of […]