Natural Worlds Sir David Attenborough, great naturalist and celebrated TV presenter, an indisputable “national treasure”, likes to use the phrase “the natural world”.[1] I have no objection to this usage in its place (but see below), but I think the phrase deserves scrutiny (and he is not the only one who uses it). What does […]
How Many Earths? Let’s start with a couple of thought experiments.[1] Suppose there is a certain planet that has been around for a billion years; call it Janet. Not much has changed in it during this time and it has received no bombardments from abroad. Then one day it is subjected to an intense heat […]
A Philosophy of Nature It would be nice to give a general description of nature that brings out its essential attributes; not of this or that aspect or department of nature, but the whole thing.[1] What is the general form of the natural world? When people speak of nature in this vein, they mean the […]
المخاطبات- العدد 14- أفريل 2015 AL-MUKHATABAT ISSN 1737-6432 Numéro-Issue 14 Avril-April SOME IDEAS ON LOGIC Colin MCGINN (Auteur indépendant) (1) Inverted Logic Abstract. It is argued that classical logics are not the only genuinely logical systems. In addition to modal logic, deontic logic, epistemic logic, and other recognized systems, we must make room for a […]
Botanical Philosophy Botany is more philosophically interesting than we like to think. Gradually, animals have found their way onto the philosophical curriculum; now it is time for plants to take their rightful place. Plants are puzzling; they pose hard problems. There are botanical mysteries. Plants compose about 98% of the earth’s biomass; animals the remaining […]
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Best Blog Why is this the best philosophy blog out there? For one thing, you get it for free; you don’t pay a penny for it (and I don’t make a penny). But that is a common property of blogs—why is this one the best? Because it has the best content: the best written, the […]
Colors and People People come in different colors: their eyes, their skin. Colors have two interesting properties: they are contingent and they are active. Each person could have had a different color—in some possible world my eyes are brown and my skin black. And colors are active dispositions to produce color sensations—acts, in short.[1] They […]
Hi Colin We run the Brain in Vat podcast. We have aired over 200 episodes with prominent thinkers on philosophical topics. We interviewed Peter Singer on animal welfare, Stephen Cave on immortality and David Edmonds on Derek Parfit. We have also published a series of six books based on our favourite conversations. We would like to invite you to be on our show to talk about Sex in Academia. In terms of content, we ask all […]
Are All Properties Relations? For some reason, philosophers tend to prefer properties to relations: the former are deemed more real, more concrete. To the contrary, I will argue that all properties are relations; so, if relations are unreal, so is the world. Fortunately, they are not, but that is not my concern today.[1] We have […]