Inverted Positivism I wish to introduce you to the work of an obscure Austrian philosopher. His name is Otto Otto and he lives in the suburbs of Vienna. [1] He belongs to a group called the Vienna Oval by facetious analogy with the better-known Vienna Circle. Otto (you can take this to be […]
Studying the Brain Brain studies have proceeded apace since that clump of grey tissue in our heads was tapped as the basis of mind. First it was inspected with the naked eye, prodded and poked; then dissected and anatomized; then stained and examined under a microscope; then electrically recorded, grossly and minutely; and […]
Mental and Physical Events Identity of properties is one thing; identity of particulars is another. Particulars can be identical without their properties all being identical. This is obvious: Superman is identical to Clark Kent but the property of being a flying man is not identical to the property of being a journalist. It […]
Labile Fear Fear is a besetting emotion. It is with us always. It is also a universal feature of animal life. Fear motivates like no other emotion. It is unpleasant, intense, and disruptive. We do well to understand it. The aspect of fear I want to focus on is its extremely labile […]
Identity Philosophical logicians usually distinguish between qualitative and numerical identity. The former can hold between one object and another, meaning exact similarity (we can also define a notion of partial qualitative identity). Numerical identity (which from now on I will simply call identity) is supposed to relate objects only to themselves: nothing can […]
Blind Consciousness Consciousness is information laden. Not only does it supply information about the external world, it also informs us about itself and our own body. In being conscious we find out about the world outside us and about our own subjective state and bodily condition. The faculties used to acquire these sorts […]
Philosophical Destruction The destructive impulse is particularly conspicuous in philosophy. We are forever refuting, criticizing, rejecting, disagreeing, ridiculing, dismantling, tearing down, cutting to pieces, grinding to a fine powder, annihilating, and otherwise smashing to smithereens (or sometimes mildly amending and carefully reformulating). We also construct and create, but a lot of the […]
Epistemic Nihilism When we speak of nihilism we are apt to think of moral nihilism, the kind of thing discussed in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons or by Nietzsche or the existentialists. This is the idea that moral values are fictitious, spurious, and non-existent. But the term itself is broader than that, deriving from […]
Existence and the Variable We are all familiar with Quine’s meme-like dictum, “To be is to be the value of a variable”, with its repetition of “to be” (redolent of Hamlet) and its hypnotic alliteration over “v”. We descend from the commanding heights of Being to the arid lowlands of the logical […]
Difficulties with Indeterminacy What is the doctrine of the indeterminacy of meaning? It isn’t easy to get a firm handle on it: are we limited to saying, uninformatively, that it is the doctrine that meaning is indeterminate? But what kind of indeterminacy is at issue? Three analogies may be cited: the quantum […]