Comparative Morality It is plausible to suggest that our attributions of beauty are essentially comparative. To say that x is beautiful is to say that x is more beautiful than most things (or some such). More exactly, to say that x is a beautiful F (painting, person, motorcycle) is to say that […]
Instantiating the Mental Objects have properties: that seems safe to say. But what is an object and what is a property and what is having? We can point to paradigms: the object that is my desk has the property of being brown. Philosophers like to paraphrase such a statement as follows: […]
Self- Knowledge Knowledge expressed using “I” is different from knowledge expressed using other modes of reference (names, descriptions, demonstratives). I know that I wrote The Subjective View and I also know that Colin McGinn wrote The Subjective View, but these are different pieces of knowledge despite the identity of reference. […]
The Connected Mind Massive modularity is the order of the day. The mind, like the body, is made up of a large number of separate mental organs (faculties, systems). Here is a typical list: the five senses, memory (several kinds), the moral faculty, the mathematical faculty, the theory of mind faculty, […]
A Counterfactual Theory of Morality It is frequently maintained that moral sentences are logically misleading: they look like straightforward fact-stating descriptive statements but actually they are not. Their underlying logical form differs from their surface grammatical form. Thus the emotive theory treats them as expressions of emotion (exclamations); the prescriptive theory takes […]
Monogamy Monogamy is defined by the OED as “the practice of being married to or having a sexual relationship with only one person at a time” (from Greek words meaning “single” and “marriage”). A certain type of human relationship (marriage, sexual involvement) is restricted by this practice to a single person at […]
Sentience and Morality It is often said these days that morality applies when and only when sentience is present, but the exact connection between the two is not often spelled out. The thought is that the states of insentient objects impose no obligations on us while the states of sentient beings do. […]
Externalism and the Cogito The basic meaning of the Cogito is that the existence of a conscious state implies the existence of a subject of that state. Thus thinking implies a thing that thinks, where that thing is not identical to the thought itself. We might say that something external to the […]
Being Conscious What is consciousness? What is its basic and essential character? I shall suggest the following: consciousness is the feeling of being. This terse formula will need some elaboration but it is useful as a summary statement. I mean to be speaking of consciousness in the broadest sense—the kind of consciousness […]
Reducibility Some things are said to be reducible, others irreducible. I wish to consider two questions about such claims: (a) what their modal status is and (b) what their explanation is. I won’t be interested in whether the claims are true or false but only in whether their truth is necessary or […]