Father Time I liked it best when only I existed. That was a simpler time, a purer time. Good times. I stretched out to infinity in both directions with no beginning and no end. Nothing troubled me; nothing disturbed my peace. Moments, epochs, and eons—these were my units. Oh, I was beautiful! I […]
Space, Time, and Matter: A Note It is sometimes said, jokingly, that it is fortunate time exists or else everything would happen simultaneously. We could also say, jokingly, that it is fortunate space exists or else everything would have to be in the same place. If space existed but time didn’t, […]
A New Riddle of Induction Suppose that tomorrow the sun does not rise, bread does not nourish, and swans are blue. Does that show that nature is not uniform, that the past is not projectable to the future, and that induction has broken down? Can we conclude that what we observe tomorrow does not […]
A Problem in Hume Early in the TreatiseHume sets out to establish what he calls a “general proposition”, namely: “That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent” (Book I, Section I, p.52).[1]What kind of […]
Jane Austen’s Moral Universe Jane Austen is the most moral of writers, but what is her morality? What values does she espouse and promote? That is not an easy question, given the elusiveness of the authorial mind and the gap between life and art, but I propose to deal with an […]
Memory Illusions In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, a thoughtful and unassuming young woman, makes the following observations to a certain Miss Crawford: “If any one faculty of our nature may be called morewonderful than the rest, I do believe it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the […]
Multi-Dimensional (Inclusive) Semantics I address you today in a spirit of inclusiveness and diversity. For too long semantics (theory of meaning) has been the confine of a single type of entity held to constitute all that meaning encompasses (or a couple of entities, closely related). We must broaden our horizons and recognize […]
External Conditions of Thought The idea of the singular proposition is that propositions can contain particulars as well as universals as their constituents. If I think that that bird is pretty, my thought’s content contains both a particular bird and the general property of being pretty. Thus a singular thought has […]
Existence and theCogito The Cogitostrikes most people as intuitively valid, but it has been trenchantly criticized. How exactly the inference is supposed to work still excites controversy. Here I will consider a line of objection that I have not seen pressed before. The natural way to interpret the inference is that it […]
Moral Distance We tend to think that our moral obligations fall off with distance: the closer someone is to us the greater is his moral claim on us, and the further away the less. Morality operates like gravity—it weakens with distance. True, morality is an expanding circle, but it […]