Musical Therapy It is well known that listening to and performing music has cognitive benefits. It is not known, however, what explains these benefits—in virtue of what is music good exercise for the brain? I conjecture that three factors are at work: mathematics, memory, and emotion. Music is mathematical, because of scales and keys, as […]
Moral Knowledge I am going to defend a view of which I am morally certain: moral knowledge is the best kind of knowledge we have—intellectually, epistemologically. It is knowledge at its finest, purest, least qualified. It is the shining star in the epistemological firmament. Needless to say, this goes against the grain of the entire […]
Ignorance and Other Minds What do we know better—material objects or other minds? In the ordinary course of things, there is a lot about material objects of which we are ignorant: their insides, their chemical composition, their unseen side, their atomic structure, the nature of matter itself. They are often too distant to see well, […]
Productivity I am perplexed by my own productivity. I don’t understand it. It seems like a bottomless well. As a psychologist, I’d like to have a theory about it. It’s something of a burden, truth be told, though not an annoyance. It seems out of my control. I wish I could bottle and sell it […]
Illusions of Mind Is it possible to maintain that we know other minds better than we know other bodies—or even our own body? Can we be more skeptical about our knowledge of bodies than our knowledge of other minds? That sounds unlikely, given that we infer other minds from other bodies: we see other bodies […]
Romances A romance is a love affair between two people. But this doesn’t specify what kind of love affair: it could be sexual love, but it need not be. It could be an intellectual romance; then it connotes shared passions and interests of an intellectual nature. The idea is of a cooperative, committed, passionate relationship […]
Mathematical Philosophy In 1919 Bertrand Russell published a book titled Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, written while he was in jail; but the title is somewhat misleading, because the book isn’t about doing philosophy mathematically but about the philosophy of mathematics. Still, Russell did do a fair amount of mathematical philosophy: the theory of descriptions, existence […]
God and Matter Berkeley was convinced that matter and God are incompatible. If matter exists, God doesn’t; and if God exists, matter doesn’t.[1] I want to spell this out a bit, because Berkeley is onto something important here. His basic point is that if you postulate matter, you open the way for skepticism, mystery, and […]
The Selfless Gene The logic of selfish gene theory is impeccable, but its usual formulation leaves something to be desired in point of strict and literal accuracy. I propose to remedy that. No harm will be done to the theory thereby; we will merely clarify its exact import. First, some terminology: by “gene” I will […]
Mathematical Knowledge We can all agree that human beings have mathematical knowledge. We understand mathematical concepts. But how extensive is mathematical knowledge—what subjects are mathematical? The OED defines mathematics as “the branch of science concerned with number, quantity, and space, either as abstract concepts or as applied to physics, engineering, and other subjects”. But the […]