“Mr. Oover’s moral tone, and his sense of chivalry, were of the American kind: far higher than ours, even, and far better expressed. Whereas the English guests of the Junta, when they heard the tale of Nellie O’Mora, would merely murmur ‘Poor girl!’ or ‘What a shame!’ Mr. Oover said in a tone of quiet […]
“And Americans, individually, are of all people the most anxious to please. That they talk overmuch is often taken as a sign of self-satisfaction. It is merely a mannerism. Rhetoric is a thing inbred in them. They are quite unconscious of it. It is as natural to them as breathing. And, while they talk on, […]
Now that same-sex marriage is legal in these United States, what about the rights of the bisexual? He or she is only allowed to marry one person at a time, thus restricting his or her expression of sexual orientation within marriage. Such a person may not believe in sex outside marriage, so that our laws […]
I have a proof that the brain is a computer. I am a computer (I can do calculations); I am identical to my brain; therefore my brain is a computer.
There are not many mysterians in the world, at least visible out-of-the-closet mysterians, but the following four people clearly qualify: me, Chomsky, Fodor, and Pinker. This is a large enough sample to inquire what the mysterian psychology is like–what do the four of us have in common? It might be supposed that a mysterian is […]
“For proper appreciation of Maeterlinck, you must have, besides a sense of beauty, a taste for wisdom. Maeterlinck is not less a sage than a poet. Of all living thinkers whose names are known to me, he has the firmest and widest grasp of the truth. He more clearly than any other thinker is conscious […]
I had the plumbers at my house yesterday and it occurred to me to wonder: Isn’t plumbing really an instance of the “extended gut”? Isn’t it rather arbitrary where we conventionally think the digestive system leaves off? What if your colon were replaced with a PVC prosthesis and extended further out into the environment? What […]
I see that MIT Press has put an ad for my book Philosophy of Language on Leiter’s blog, which seems kinda funny to me. On the right side is an ad for a new book by Max Deutsch, The Myth of the Intuitive, who was a PhD student of mine at Rutgers.
I’ve been deep in Max Beerbohm. I want to recommend him to you, one and all. But he is so impossible to summarize or encapsulate, his qualities so resistant to paraphrase, that all one can is quote him, and then stand back in wonder. Let me just say that he is the most pleasurable writer […]
“He was a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin vague beard–or rather, he had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat.”