Just to keep my faithful readers up to date, I’ve just been correcting the copy-edited ms of my book Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays for MIT Press. There are seven sections on Mind, Language, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Biology, Ethics, and Religion. My sense reading the essays over is that they are pretty damn provocative, though often quite […]
The Trump psychodrama is a thing to behold: his mind is a complete mess. He will say anything to try to get himself out of trouble but only gets himself in more trouble. He is clearly paranoid as well as untruthful–and I doubt he knows where the one ends and the other begins. He is […]
It’s hard not to be obsessed by recent American politics. I try not be, but I fail. Every day I have to keep my eye on the news. Clinton’s recent illness terrified me. Trump’s support seems horribly solid, no matter what he says or does. I do thoroughly approve of Colin Kaepernick’s protests, though.
People tend to project their bad qualities onto other people, but not so much their good qualities. Why? One explanation is that they are lazy and find it easier to assume that everyone is like them. Freud’s explanation was that projection is a mechanism of ego defense: we can’t bear the thought of our own […]
I have to concede victory to Usain Bolt: he has achieved the triple triple. I have only achieved the double triple. But I console myself that I am taller, younger, and can run faster than him. (I hope readers can detect the irony in these remarks, but if they cannot I give up. Compare a […]
Simone Biles!
He has been remarkably durable, given his failings, but surely now he has no way to claw back the ground he has lost. He lives in a fantasy world; he has no idea when he is lying or not. I am always fascinated by the white circles round his eyes (probably the result of tanning […]
“I have one of the world’s top temperaments, believe me. It’s right up there with Putin’s. He admires my temperament by the way–compares it to caviar. I say gold caviar. I have a hundred times the temperament of Hillary Clinton. She has no temperament really. My temperament is soooo presidential, I can tell you that. […]
When Wittgenstein said “the world is the totality of facts” he obviously hadn’t anticipated the “fictional turn”: the world is now the totality of feelings, fears, wishes, prejudices, allegations, insinuations, ideologies, inventions. I liked Bill Clinton’s simple contrast in his speech of last night: there is the “real Hillary” and there is the “made up […]