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 […]
Behavior We are familiar with the doctrine of behaviorism and with the phrase “behavioral science”, but we are left in the dark about what exactly behavior is. What does it mean to say that the mind is reducible to behavior or that psychology is the study of behavior? One possible answer is […]
Oliver Sacks on the Meaning of Life “Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” I wish to make some comments on this passage from my late friend Oliver Sacks, which I think deserves […]
Philosophical Philosophy Philosophy takes place within a social, political, and intellectual context. There is a surrounding culture or environment. Religion, morality, the arts, the sciences, war, peace, a general optimism or pessimism—all these factors impinge on the way philosophy is practiced during a particular historical period. The factors can vary over time, […]
The Puzzle of Empiricism Even the most ardent opponent of empiricist epistemology will concede that it is not wholly wrong. It may be that much knowledge is not based on experience, and it is no doubt true that knowledge requires more than mere experience, but surely it is undeniable that some knowledge comes […]
The Lure of Elimination I don’t despise eliminative positions in philosophy. I think they show something important about philosophical problems—that they can drive us to eliminative extremes. The term “eliminativist” is usually applied in the philosophy of mind and in psychology: it is the idea that the mind does not exist, that […]
The Futility of Reduction The idea of reduction is rampant in contemporary philosophy, particularly in relation to the mind. Thus we hear talk of reductive materialism or reductive behaviorism, or of reductionism about the mental. Likewise, though less frequently, we have reductive views of the moral or even the physical (as with […]