Yesterday I had the pleasure of conductng my first seminar in eight years. We discussed two papers of mine from this blog. We used Zoom. The students were excellent, the discussion scintillating; it was just what a philosophy seminar should be. You ask what institution organized this seminar–is it perhaps indicative of a thaw? Perhaps […]
Is Reference Real? “Sitting next to her, talking with her about the simplest and most insignificant subjects, Prince Andre admired the joyful shining of her eyes and smile, which referred not to what they were saying, but to her inner happiness”: Tolstoy, War and Peace, Volume II, Part Three, chapter XVII. […]
The Meta-Linguistic Turn Suppose you are interested in the nature of numbers or causation or necessity or the mind or values. Your interests are traditionally metaphysical or ontological. You propose to think about these things and try to come up with answers. But someone tells you that you are going about […]
I don’t usually like to comment on what is going on in the “the profession”, but the recent skirmish between Robin Dembroff and Alex Byrne over the definition of “woman” reminds me of two incidents in which I was involved: two young female professors wrote highly personal critical reviews of my books Basic Structures of […]
Causation: Invisible Cement I wish to make some inconclusive but perhaps suggestive remarks about a subject that has troubled me for 50 years. Hume’s imperishable contribution is well known: whatever the objective nature of causation may be, we can say with confidence that our knowledge of it is neither a priori […]
The Humanistic Turn A popular narrative has it that analytical philosophy replaced an emphasis on knowledge with an emphasis on language. It is said that Descartes brought epistemology to the center of philosophy and that Frege shifted the center to the philosophy of language (assisted by Wittgenstein, Austin, et al). Thus […]
The combination of Covid19, Trump, and police brutality is producing a toxic mixture of fear, anger, impotence, and disgust that is afflicting the national psyche. Who knows where it will lead. Therapists stand to prosper. I myself am suffering from an acute case of America-phobia.
Is Natural Selection Physical? Is Darwin’s theory of evolution a physical theory? Does anything mental enter into its explanatory apparatus? There are two main components to the theory: mutation and natural selection. It might well seem that these are both entirely physical phenomena, because mutation is just chance genetic change (change in the […]
Aesthetic and Moral Syllogisms Consider the proposition “x is aesthetically better than y”: does this entail the proposition “I should engage with xin preference to y”? One might suppose so, but in fact it doesn’t, unless we add something like “other things being equal”. If x is more intellectual demanding than y and […]
How Mysterious is Evolution? The basic mechanism of evolution is not mysterious at all. Random variation combined with natural selection is a fully intelligible means of biological change, perspicuously accounting for speciation. The abstract idea has a mathematical simplicity to it: (a) a process for generating outcomes at random, and (b) a method […]