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 […]
Forms of Analysis Since Plato inaugurated conceptual analysis a certain pattern has recurred. His first stab at an analysis of knowledge broke it down into two parts: truth and belief. To know something you had to believe it and it had to be true. Neither element alone was sufficient (though […]
Feeling the Brain You can feel your heart. It beats perceptibly in your chest. Before you ever knew what a heart was you could feel it in there. When you learned about its anatomy and physiology you had no trouble recognizing the thing you knew about before: you didn’t doubt […]
Father Time I liked it best when only I existed. That was a simpler time, a purer time. Good times. I stretched out to infinity in both directions with no beginning and no end. Nothing troubled me; nothing disturbed my peace. Moments, epochs, and eons—these were my units. Oh, I […]