Chapter Six Predictably, a cult formed around her name—the “Amberists”. Their agenda? To root out evil wherever it was found. They were fanatically anti-evil, and Amber was their tool. They tried to imitate her: they would consume heaps of bad food and then go out to confront evil in all its forms. This never worked […]
Chapter Five You might not have thought that Amber and Tang Wurlitzer had a lot in common, but Tang didn’t see it that way. She had all these problems with people and things: advertisements, supermarket chickens, news programs, history, politics, prisons. But Tang never had a problem with anyone: it was his job not to […]
Chapter Four Several years went by, relatively uneventfully. Amber grew accustomed to her affliction, her special talent. She learned how to manage it, as best she could. She even returned to school. She was permitted to keep mainly to herself. The playground was decreed off-limits. Fortunately, people tended to steer clear of her, for obvious […]
Chapter Three And so it was established to the highest scientific standards: Amber was suffering from ETS. She had a badness-detector inside her rigged to her esophagus. The news spread quickly, as all medical news will: it was initially reported in a medical magazine by none other than Dr. Denise Evelyn Daniloff. The article caused […]
Chapter Two That business with the cards was only the beginning of Amber’s illness. She had it bad. Her illness was wicked. It could strike at any moment: in the car, in the playground, watching TV. It could even happen while she slept. She might wake up with a soiled pillow if she had a […]
THE LITTLE SICK GIRL[1] Chapter One Not very long ago, under a bright quarter moon, a little girl was born. The moon blinked as her round bald head popped out from inside her mother, and a purplish pale light came over the night sky. The wind stopped its gossiping for a moment. Even space […]
Human Morality Humans have an elaborate moral system, but animals don’t. We have all sorts of moral rules and think about right and wrong constantly, but animals hardly give it a moment’s thought. We are the moral (naked) ape. This fact is commonly taken to show that we are superior to animals, morally superior. They […]
Categories of Intentionality It’s time to get serious about intentionality. I mean we need to develop a systematic taxonomy of it—a classificatory scheme. And we need to include the whole it, not just this or that type. We also need to clean up and systematize the terminology, because the word “intentionality” hinders comprehension: it has […]
Philosophers and Novelists Some professional novelists are amateur philosophers (too numerous to list). There are many philosophical novels. The same goes for poets, playwrights, and short story writers (also song writers). Fiction has room for philosophy. But there are very few professional philosophers who are amateur novelists (or professional ones). Philosophers seldom write fiction on […]
Ideal Languages Logic-minded philosophers have lamented the logical ineptitude of natural languages like English. They have recommended improvements based on formal systems. They have tried to approximate to an ideal language—one free of all logical defect. Others have decried these revisions and declared natural languages fine as they are; they have preferred descriptive philosophy of […]