Can Dogs Talk? I watched a very interesting documentary last night on PBS about whether dogs can talk. Of course, they do talk—they talk dog. There could be an interesting documentary on whether humans can talk…dog language. They might to a limited degree, but not as well as dogs. But the documentary was about whether […]
Possible Language Semantics The theory of meaning is supposed to concern the semantics of our language: in virtue of what does human language have the meaning it has? But do all possible languages share the same semantics? Might a semantic theory that is incorrect for our language correctly describe the semantics of some alien language? If […]
Meaning Explained (Finally) It’s really very strange that we can’t say what meaning is. Surely, we know what we mean! Meaning is a mental act and we know our mental acts, don’t we? Yet all attempts hitherto have foundered, often embarrassingly so. Mental images, sensations, definite descriptions, objects in the world, rules of use, behavioral […]
A page from my first (unpublished) novel, written circa 1984–punk existentialist as someone once described it. Sent from my iPhone
Ethics, Epistemology, and Metaphysics Ethics, as currently conceived and taught, is divided into three parts: metaethics, ethical theory (normative ethics), and practical ethics. This seems like a sensible division. Metaethics deals with issues concerning the status of moral discourse, what values ultimately consist in, how ethics is known (if it is), whether values are subjective […]
Consciousness and the Origin of Philosophy What causes philosophy—the subject—to exist? I shall argue that consciousness is what causes philosophy to exist, or rather consciousness-in-the-world. The consciousness-world nexus is the origin of philosophy. It isn’t the world by itself or consciousness by itself; it’s the situation of consciousness in the world, or the situation of […]
Oliver Sacks’ Fabrications I have just come across an article by Rachel Aviv in the December 15 edition of the New Yorker about Oliver Sacks’ dubious case histories, especially in Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Apparently, Sacks acknowledged that he made things up in his private journals, to which […]
Book Reviewer Released I am a recovering book reviewer. I used to do it all the time; now not so much, if at all. It started when I was twenty-two in Manchester, England, when I wrote a couple of reviews for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology at the request of Wolfe Mays, […]