I’ve been reading a lot of Dawkins lately. Here’s an idea for a new paper: “Arms Races Between Extended Selfish Cooperative Memes”. Memes get together in the battle of ideas using extensions of the mind to do so. You just have to put the theoretical pieces together. I invite someone else to write the paper.
I watched an excellent documentary on The Jam the other day, with the incomparable Paul Weller in fine mod form. It reminded me of the state of England in the early 1980’s, especially as captured in their song “A Bomb in Wardour Street”. This is the world I tried to depict in my novel Bad […]
Readers may be interested to know that I have just published four papers on philosophy of logic in a journal they may never have heard of. The journal is edited from Tunisia and publishes in English, French and Arabic; the chief editor is Hamdi Mlika. It is called: AL MUKHATABAT: Journal for Logic, Epistemology and […]
This is published in the journal Emotion Review, but I thought it might be useful to post it here too. Disgust and Disease It is possible to be interested in the same thing in different ways. These different ways may well involve different methods of enquiry and criteria of success. In the […]
I thought this review in the New York Review of Books of my Philosophy of Language was very well done (unlike certain others I could mention). It was informative, well-written, and the reviewer actually understood the book (unlike certain others I could mention). I also liked the way Rebecca linked the book to the question of […]
For some reason we are having a technical problem and have lost (I hope temporarily) some recent content. I’m assured qualified people are looking into it.
Did I mention that my book Prehension recently came out? I have held it in my hands. It’s a funny book. It’s not really a philosophy book, but a science book. But it’s more like nineteenth century science, informal and personal, as well as “scientific”. The title alludes both to gripping with the hands and […]
Tim Hunt has now been completely exonerated. His main accuser has been totally discredited. Many rash and stupid people have egg on their face, including serious news organizations. And yet he is still being excluded from positions that are rightfully his. It was obvious to anyone that this was a put-up job from the start, […]
This is a new thread for reader contributions.
I was watching the Marx brothers film Horse Feathers and noticed a reference to the distinction between de reand de dicto readings of vernacular sentences. Groucho says to Chico, “You have the brain of a four year old…and I bet he was glad to get rid of it”. The joke depends upon switching from a narrow scope reading […]