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 […]
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 […]