Real Freedom The free will debate is usually characterized as a dispute about whether or not freedom is compatible with determinism. Determinism is understood as the doctrine that all events are subject to the laws of nature, which admit of no exceptions. So an act like raising your arm […]
Puzzling Pimples The philosophy of pimples is an underdeveloped subject. Why do we react to them with such revulsion? The other night I was watching TV (Jimmy Kimmel Live, 14 August, 2018) and was treated to some footage of assorted people looking at film of pimples being burst. My […]
Proprioception and Naïve Realism Philosophical discussions of sense perception seldom address proprioception, but it is a question whether theories that hold for the other senses, particularly vision, hold for proprioception. The objects of proprioception are generally taken to be the muscles and joints, possibly also the skin; they do not […]
Problems of Other Minds We speak of the problem of other minds, in the singular, but it is instructive to disentangle different strands in what is so described. Does the difficulty of knowing other minds stem from the nature of mind or from the contingent limits of our faculties […]
Pointless Knowledge God is said to be omniscient: he knows everything. There is nothing he doesn’t know, no matter how minor or inconsequential. I think this poses a problem for God’s existence, because some knowledge is pointless—and nothing about God should be pointless. It is sometimes noted that God knows about little […]
Plurality and the Big Bang It is said that the big bang created space and time—they did not exist beforehand. Thus something existed (a “singularity”) before space and time existed; and it was some sort of empirical particular not an abstract entity. It is generally conceived as superhot […]
Platonic Pragmatism The pragmatic theory of truth has this going for it: it recognizes that truth is something with value. Truth is something we ought to pursue and hence has a normative aspect. It is good to believe what is true and bad to believe what is false. Truth […]
Physics and the Physical It sounds reasonable—indeed tautological–to say that physics is about the physical, as psychology is about the psychological. But that is not clearly true. Consider Newton’s physics: it includes not only physical things in the ordinary sense but also space and time—as well as gravitational force. That […]
Philosophy Defined It is an embarrassment to philosophers that they cannot define their discipline. It makes them look like shady operators. I propose to alleviate their embarrassment by offering a succinct definition of philosophy. If you ask a physicist what physics is about, he will say that it is […]
Philosophy as Biology In the 1960s linguistics took a biological turn with the work of Lenneberg and Chomsky. [1] Language was held to be genetically fixed, a species universal, just like the anatomy of the body. It is a biological aspect of human beings, not something cultural or learned, more like […]