Happy Families “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This famous remark by Tolstoy usually provokes a wry smile and a sage nod, but is it true and what exactly does it mean? We may paraphrase it thus: there is only one kind […]
The Concept of Miracle Where do we get the concept of the miraculous? Why does that concept seem compelling to us? Why do we take to it so readily? It is not, to be sure, from the observation of miracles, in the style of empiricism—we don’t have perceptions of actual […]
Discrete and Continuous Philosophy is awash in grand dichotomies—particular and general, mind and body, fact and value, finite and infinite, being and nothingness. Reality is held to divide into two large categories and the relations between them are mapped. But there is one dichotomy that is seldom discussed by philosophers, though […]
Realisms and Anti-Realisms We reflexively speak of realism and anti-realism, as if we had a dichotomy of positions: you are either a realist or an anti-realist about a given subject matter. But this is too simple: there is a range of positions going from one extreme to another, depending upon the […]
Fiona and Me I was watching the impeachment hearings on Thursday waiting for Dr. Fiona Hill to begin her testimony, expecting to hear an American woman speak. When she started speaking I immediately knew she was English by origin and a few seconds later recognized her accent as characteristic of […]
Are relations real? There are reasons to think not, even though properties are agreed to be real. That would yield a metaphysics in which relations are regarded as mental constructions projected onto the world, while properties (or most of them) are treated as objective constituents of reality. That is, we embrace idealism about relations and […]
Consider a possible world in which the fundamental constituents of reality are mental in nature. Suppose a kind of mental atomism holds: there are basic elements that combine to form less basic elements. We thus have simple and complex mental entities. But suppose further that there is a special kind of emergence in this world […]
We have the word “see” but also the phrase “seeming to see”. The former implies veridicality, but the latter does not. You can seem to see what isn’t there. The locution is useful in stating certain philosophical doctrines about perception, to the effect that seeing is a composite of an inner sense impression and an […]
It was Wittgenstein who sparked philosophical interest in what psychologists call ambiguous figures.[1] The phrase “seeing as” became a staple of philosophical vocabulary and various uses were made of it. I want to revisit the topic in the hope of gaining some clarity on the matter. There are many instances of so-called ambiguous figures: Rubin’s […]
It is difficult to explain the origin of life on earth. Presumably, inorganic molecules at some point made the transition to organic molecules, allowing for self-replication. The state of the earth at some time and place must have been conducive to this event, while it wasn’t before and elsewhere. Even if life on earth was seeded […]