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 […]
Philosophical Economics Economics tells us that an economic transaction involves the sale (or exchange) of “goods and services”. This phrase invites conceptual scrutiny. It is notable that an evaluative term is used to describe the commodities sold: goods are good. [1] Services also are inherently valuable: you don’t perform someone the […]
Phenomenological Ignorance We can’t know what it’s like to be a bat. This is an instance of a more general truth: no one can grasp the nature of experiences that are radically different from their own. We can grasp the nature of experiences similar to our own, but we can’t […]
Perceptual Duality The traditional distinction between primary and secondary qualities has clear implications for the nature of perception. Primary qualities are possessed by objects independently of perceivers and do not owe their existence to perceivers: they are objective. Secondary qualities are dependent on perceivers, being projected by the mind onto objects that otherwise […]
Pain and Unintelligent Design Pain is a very widespread biological adaptation. Pain receptors are everywhere in the animal world. Evidently pain serves the purposes of the genes—it enables survival. It is not just a by-product or holdover; it is specifically functional. To a first approximation we can say that pain […]
Our Concept of Mind How good is our concept of mind—how extensive, how accurate, how penetrating? I shall suggest that it is not very good—limited, misleading, shallow. It is much less good than our concept of body. It covers mental reality only ineptly, incompetently. There are three areas to consider: […]
Origins of the Free Will Problem In its modern form the problem of free will is supposed to arise from the scientific discovery (or perhaps scientific presupposition) that determinism is true. It is a tenet of modern science (at least of the Newtonian kind) that every event in […]