I just finished the first week of the new semester. I’m teaching a course on ethics that I’ve never taught before, starting with ethical relativism. To my surprise, the students put up no resistance to the criticisms I made of relativism–despite the fact that students always tend to be relativists. I like to think they saw […]
1. Objects are composed of stuff (“matter”, “energy”, “ectoplasm”). This stuff gives the substance of the object. Is it a substratum? We can say that, though it need not be unknowable. (Truisms quickly turn into absurdities here.) It is not a priori what kind of stuff the world contains, though it is a priori that […]
I’m beginning this blog with a big chunk of metaphysics, written in the high Wittgensteinian style-a series of linked aphorisms. The ideas came to me in that way and it felt forced to try to present them in the usual discursive form. I usually don’t write in this style, and vaguely disapprove of it. Partly […]