Replicators The concept of replication is central to biology. For instance, Richard Dawkins makes heavy and illuminating use of it in The Selfish Gene and elsewhere. Here I will offer some analytical remarks about the concept, with special reference to the question of what counts as replication: what is replication and […]
The Selfish Biosphere The gene is selfish with respect to whole organisms: it replicates itself by using organisms as survival machines that might have to sacrifice themselves for the genetic good, as in raising young. Genes bear the same kind of relation to individual organisms that people used to think applied […]
Two Concepts of Freedom It is hard not to feel the pull of both of the standard positions on free will. On the one hand, it seems right to say that a free action is one that is in accordance with the agent’s desires, as opposed to one that is forced on […]
Truth and Meaning What have truth and meaning got to do with each other? A dominant view has it that the two are deeply connected—specifically, meanings are truth conditions.[1] The view comes in several varieties, but the central thought is that the meaning of a sentence consists of the state of affairs […]
The Selfless Machine In a striking passage from The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins writes as follows: “Other replicators perhaps discovered how to protect themselves, either chemically, or by building a physical wall of protein around themselves. This may have been how the first living cells appeared. Replicators began not merely to exist, […]
Criteria of Meaningfulness The positivists created a question that had not existed before, viz. what is the criterion for whether a string of words is meaningful? Their proposal was that such a string is meaningful if and only if it is empirically verifiable (with due allowance made for analytic sentences). The intention was […]
Action and Acting Jack gets up, goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge, takes out a beer, pops the cap, and drinks it. Why did he do that? Because he wanted a beer and thought there was one in the fridge. The philosopher says that Jack’s action is explained by his having […]
Manners and Morals The topic of manners, good or bad, is neglected in philosophy, receiving scant attention in moral philosophy.[1]Perhaps it is felt to be trivial compared to the weighty matters of morality. But I think the topic is not without philosophical interest and I propose to explore it programmatically. First, what […]
Rigidity Revisited A rigid designator is one that designates the same object in every possible world. Thus “Plato” designates Plato in every world; in no world does it designate anyone else. We must hasten to add that names are only rigid with respect to a language, i.e. under a particular assignment of […]
Problems of Philosophy Russell called his “shilling shocker” The Problems of Philosophy, and there is a reason for that title: philosophy consists of a set of problems. The same is not true of other subjects: physics, chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, history, economics, English literature, etc. In these subjects a certain sector of […]