Desire and Understanding In the course of a perceptive description of a cat James Joyce writes: “She understands all she wants to” (Ulysses, p.48). The cat doesn’t try to understand what she has no wish to understand, let alone what she cannot understand; she doesn’t try to acquire knowledge that doesn’t interest […]
Lolita and Quilty It is hard to fault Lolita artistically and morally, but there is one aspect of it that troubles me artistically, and possibly also morally: Lolita’s relationship with Quilty. Dare I suggest that it is a weakness in the novel? It has not always seemed so to me, but […]
Meaning, Use, and Time I propose to do a Kripke: I will describe an argument that was prompted by reading Wittgenstein—which I neither attribute to Wittgenstein nor endorse myself. [1] I think it fits many of the things he says, and I also think it is interesting and compelling; but I don’t want […]
Consciousness and Punctuation Molly Bloom’s famous stream-of-consciousness monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses goes on for over forty pages without any punctuation. Here is a brief extract: “I dont see anything so terrible about it Ill tell him about that some day not now and surprise him ay and Ill take him there […]
Personality Theory Personal identity has an established place in the philosophical universe but personality is not so sedulously studied. People have personalities (some animals too) but not much is said about them by philosophers (by psychologists, yes, where personality theory is part of the curriculum). Why not? There are some good philosophical […]
Philosophy of Memory Memory is a subject amply covered in literature and science (especially psychology) but we hear little about it in philosophy. We find books on consciousness, perception, imagination, language, emotion, the will, and the unconscious: but I don’t recall ever seeing a philosophy book devoted to memory. Memory is the forgotten […]
Knowledge, Memory, and Time We have knowledge of the past, the present, and the future—or we think we do anyway. That makes three types of knowledge, classified according to time. But when you think about it you see that there is really only one type of knowledge: knowledge of the past. [1] Knowledge […]
Fact and Value It seems to be commonly assumed that fact and value belong to separate categories: facts are not values and values are not facts. We might call this Humean dualism. The two categories are held to be exclusive and exhaustive. But is the dualism really so clear-cut? First, there is the […]
Is Existence Possible? I am going to consider an argument for the conclusion that existence is not possible. Not that we don’t know that anything exists, or that nothing in fact exists, but that existence is impossible: it could not be that anything exists. This is, to put it mildly, a startling […]
Knowledge of Things In chapter 5 of The Problems of Philosophy (“Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description”) Russell writes: “Knowledge of things, when it is of the kind we call knowledge by acquaintance, is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truths, though it would […]