Moral Minimalism I shall explore the prospects for a minimalist theory of normative ethics. By “minimalist” I mean a theory (analogous to minimalism in linguistics) that seeks to base normative ethics on the most exiguous of foundations, viz. a single moral principle, with other aspects of the ethical life consigned to […]
Strengths of Realism Realism and anti-realism are conventionally presented as dichotomous: you must be either one or the other with nothing in between. This is supposed true across the board, from material objects to moral values. But on reflection the dichotomy is too simple—there are finer distinctions to capture. We can approach […]
The Alleged Limits of Moral Philosophy Bernard Williams wrote a book entitled Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.[1]This title invites interrogation. What kind of limitation might be meant? We can all agree that philosophy is limited in someway: it cannot do what science does, for example, or history or geography or […]
The Water Paradox It has been a while since we had a new paradox to cudgel our brains over. For your edification (and frustration) I will present what I call “the water paradox”. Like all paradoxes it aims to derive an absurdity from self-evident premises, thus demonstrating the auto-destructive […]
Remarks on Metaphysics What kind of statement expresses the results of metaphysical inquiry? Wittgenstein famously begins the Tractatusthus: “The world is all that is the case” (1), “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (1.1.), “The world is determined by the facts, and by their being allthe facts” (1.11). […]
A Causal Theory of Truth We have been inundated with causal theories: of perception, knowledge, memory, and reference. But no one (to my knowledge) has proposed a causal theory of truth. On the face of it this is surprising, since truth is so closely bound up with reference. If reference […]
Colored Surfaces: A Puzzle Colors appear to be onthe surfaces of things. The surface seems saturated with color, as if the color has been painted on. Colors seem as much an intrinsic property of surfaces as textures. They are not experienced as properties of the perceiver’s body or of the […]
A New Theory of Color I will first state the theory as simply and clearly as possible, and then I will consider what may be said in its favor. I call the theory “Double Object Dispositional Primitivism” (DODP) or just “the double object theory”.[1]Its tenets are as follows: When you see […]
The Mystery of Color How does color come into the world? Not color experience but color itself—the color properties of objects. How do things come to be red, say? Not by virtue of their intrinsic objective properties, since things are not intrinsically and objectively colored. Shape properties (among others) come […]
The Nature of Things Long ago there lived a pre-Socratic philosopher named Kryptos. Kryptos was interested in change and he had noticed an interesting fact about change: some changes leave an object in existence while other changes put an object out of existence. If you bend a stick or move it […]