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 […]
Skepticism About the Conceptual World I will describe a startling new form of skepticism, to be set beside more familiar forms. It lurks beneath the surface of recent work on meaning and reference. Consider “water”: it has both a meaning (sense, connotation) and a reference (denotation, extension). Suppose its meaning […]
Sexual Knowledge In endnote [A] to An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume asks: “I should desire to know, what can be meant by asserting, that self-love, or resentment of injuries, or the passion between the sexes is not innate?” He clearly thinks that these “ideas” (Locke’s term) are innate, so […]
Selfish Genes and Selfish Beasts It is sometimes supposed that selfish gene theory implies that animals are always biologically selfish—that all animals carry “genes for selfishness”. That is a misunderstanding because the whole point of the theory is to allow for kin-related altruism: an animal will act against its own […]