Skepticism About the Conceptual World I will describe a startling new form of skepticism, to be set beside more familiar forms. It lurks beneath the surface of recent work on meaning and reference. Consider “water”: it has both a meaning (sense, connotation) and a reference (denotation, extension). Suppose its meaning […]
Epistemology as Metaphysics We usually teach epistemology as a separate field from metaphysics. On the one hand, there is reality, the subject matter of metaphysics, and on the other there is knowledge of reality, the subject matter of epistemology. It is sometimes said that Descartes made epistemology the foundation of […]
A Difficulty With Utilitarianism Utilitarianism maintains that the value of a state of affairs depends solely on its level of utility. For a state of affairs to be good (desirable, valuable) it is necessary and sufficient that it contains the best possible level of wellbeing (pleasure, happiness, preference satisfaction). So if […]
Metaphysics and Philosophy In the Epilogue to my book The Character of Mind(1982), entitled “The Place of the Philosophy of Mind”, I wrote: “It would be misguided to infer from the points we have been making that the philosophy of mind is the most basic area of philosophy: probably no […]
Is Descriptive Metaphysics Possible? Strawson draws his famous distinction between two types of metaphysics in these words: “Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure”. This formulation raises puzzling questions. One might have thought that descriptive metaphysics […]
Good Works, Bad People What should we do about people who do bad things but produce good works of art? What about a child-molesting composer, say? Should his works be banned? The question is not simple and I shall work up to an answer by considering some thought experiments. Suppose a man, […]
I’ve just finished re-reading Jane Austen’s Emma, which I first read while studying it for A-level in 1967. It’s a sparkling and thoroughly enjoyable novel, full of moral wisdom. But I was struck by something I have not heard commented on: Mr. Knightley confesses to Emma that he first fell in love with her when she […]
A Plea for Persuasion Jane Austen’s sixth and final novel is entitled Persuasion. There is a reason it is so entitled—it deals with the role of persuasion in human life (as exemplified in Anne Eliot being persuaded against her better judgment not to marry Captain Wentworth). But we might see the […]
The Non-Existence of Lolita The novel Lolitatakes for granted the existence of Lolita—or does it? Is she real? There is no doubt that Dolores Haze, a twelve-year-old American schoolgirl, is real: but isLolitareal? To answer this question we must first investigate the category of the nymphet: is there such a thing as a nymphet? Early […]
Feeling the Brain You can feel your heart. It beats perceptibly in your chest. Before you ever knew what a heart was you could feel it in there. When you learned about its anatomy and physiology you had no trouble recognizing the thing you knew about before: you didn’t doubt […]