Listening to The Jam. A-bomb in Wardour Street (“Rape and murder throughout the land, and they tell you that you’re still a free man. If this is freedom I don’t understand, coz it seems like madness to me”). Nothing seems to improve. Evil is everywhere. Cure: the extinction of the human species. But the tennis […]
I know my readers like cat stories, so I have a good one for you. Nearly a year ago I found a kitten in my garden, howling. I adopted him and called him Blackie, on account of his being jet black all over. He is a nice friendly non-violent cat. One of my other cats, […]
A lot has been said on this subject and no doubt it is a complete disaster in every way. To me one of the worst aspects of it will be the festering resentment created: within England, within Britain, and within Europe. There will be dislike and suspicion everywhere; ill feeling, anger, contempt. Even if it […]
Readers may be interested to learn that I have signed a contract with MIT Press to publish a collection of my recently written papers, numbering 50 odd (the remaining 60 or so papers may be published in a later volume). The papers are on a great many subjects but they all aim to provoke–hence the […]
I’ve been reading Hume’s Enquiry and am struck by how much I didn’t understand it before–and how little it is still understood. Several commentators have noted that Hume does not deny the existence of necessary connection, merely noting that our only knowledge of causation arises from experience of constant conjunction; but it is striking how much […]
I was reading an interesting article in the travel section of the NY Times yesterday about Nabokov’s journeys with his wife Vera across some of the more desolate parts of America, which form the basis for the extended sequence in “Lolita” in which Humbert and Lo desolately crisscross the desolate country. It occurred to me […]
We need a meme to express what seems to be happening to people’s brains. The internet has created, along with other cultural forces, a certain type of mind, which affects even people who should be immune to it. I propose to call them “Net Heads”. We can also speak of having “net head” or being […]
I just read a rather silly review of my book Inborn Knowledge by Peter Carruthers. Was he even trying to get the point? I make it a policy not to reply to reviews, especially silly ones, but there is a point I would like to correct because it concerns a friend of mine: Jerry Fodor. […]
I’ve started to think that the customary way we divide up the mind into the conscious, the unconscious, and the preconscious is too crude and unrevealing. The connection between, say, a perception and an immediate memory of it is far too close to be captured by these categories. Isn’t it the same thing that exists […]
Tom was a feral cat that lived on my property. I fed him every day for two and a half years, two or three times a day. He was half blind and quite lame; he often had wounds on his head. I used to pat him occasionally, but then one day he bit me, so […]