It is often held that something has value only in virtue of being valued by some evaluative being: value is conferred on something by the attitude of valuing. This is supposed to be true even of pleasure. But is the act of valuing itself something that has value? If not, it is hard to see how […]
Some superpowerful aliens arrive one day and offer to ship us off to their galaxy if we’d like. It’s really nice there, they assure us, and they have the photographs to prove it. Our standard of living will go up at least 20% and we can all live at the beach. But if we accept […]
If physics needs an interpretation, in rather the way a formal language does, if it is to be meaningful, doesn’t that show that metaphysics is indispensable? Physical knowledge can’t be all the knowledge there is, because the formulas of physics stand in need of interpretation. Are electrons continuant particulars or are they just sequences of events? […]
I’m about to go to Chicago for a conference on global warming and like environmental issues (part of the Chicago Festival of the Humanities). I’m appearing with Peter Singer and Chris Stone, with Dale Jamieson as chair. For me there will be some local cooling–going from Miami to Chicago. My thesis will be that the […]
I like W.D. Ross’s mixed deontology of irreducible prima facie duties, like keeping promises and repaying debts and exercising beneficence. Ross takes these duties to be self-evident and known with certainty, while he acknowledges that we can have no more than “probable opinion” about the rightness of a particular action. He also accepts that the […]
Dispositions don’t tie down meaning and reference (Quine, Kripke). Dispositions don’t tie down qualia (pace functionalism). And dispositions don’t tie down matter (Russell et al). Neither language nor mind nor matter can be explained in terms of dispositions. Dispositions are a superstructure suspended over these three realms, but not their essence. Reality is not subjunctive.
Lately I’ve found that as my backhand has improved my forehand has deteriorated. Now my backhand is my best shot, while in the past I struggled with it (as most players do). There seems to be what psychologists call negative transfer of training from one hand to the other. The forehand used to feel natural […]
I’m putting a story about a raccoon and me on the site. It happened this summer, and every detail in my telling is factual–strange as some of it may sound. Make of it what you will.
I’ve just been teaching Kantian ethics. The idea is that a right action is one the guiding maxim of which can be universalized without contradiction, and a wrong action is one that cannot be so universalized. So it is wrong to break your promises because if everyone did so there would be no institution of […]
Last weekend I for the first time played tennis against a ball machine. It was quite an experience. I hit balls by myself on the court for a full three hours, working on my technique (half volley backhands, down the line side to side forehands). I’m sure I improved my game considerably. Then I played […]