This is a reply I wrote to an email from Tom Nagel. It may be helpful even without his prompting email. A Reply My OED gives as the primary meaning of “world” “the earth with all its countries and peoples”, immediately followed by “one’s life and activities”. The first is not philosophically relevant except as […]
The World The word “world” is a slippery customer. It seems to have two meanings, ordinary and philosophical. In one use it refers to one’s world-view or world of activity, as in “the tortoise’s world” or “How are things in your world?” Here the word is qualified by “of”—the world of X. There are many […]
Future Trump Trump’s law is this: it is always much worse than you think it will be. I am constantly surprised at how bad it keeps getting. With this in mind let’s contemplate the likely future unless things radically change. First, Trump withdraws support to Ukraine and the Russians take over the country. Unimaginable horrors […]
Bodily Identity Suppose you are interested in the nature of bodily survival: under what conditions does a body survive into the future? Your initial theory is that identity through time is a necessary and sufficient condition: the body then must be numerically identical to the body now. This is generally how it is and you […]
The Eternal City Chapter 39 of Catch-22, “The Eternal City”, is the heart of the novel, though it stands out like an amputated thumb. It is stylistically quite unlike the rest of this five-hundred-page work. There is no humor in it. It is bleak to the point of pugilism: it pulverizes the reader. Yossarian is […]
Catch America The reaction to Catch-22 constitutes an interesting sequel to the book itself. Ostensibly about World War II, it took off during the Vietnam war. It inaugurates the Sixties in America. Among the more perceptive critics, we find Robert Brustein writing in the New Republic (a magazine for which I used to write). He […]
Philosophy Naturalized Quine’s famous paper “Epistemology Naturalized” advocates handing epistemology over to the psychologists. No more traditional a priori epistemology; let’s have empirical science instead. Cognitive science replaces conceptual analysis—that sort of thing. This will put an end to endless irresoluble philosophical disputes and set epistemology on the path to academic respectability (you know the […]
Catch 22 I have been reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, published in 1961, a book I have long wanted to read. It is better than I expected, less time worn, more trenchant (and funny). As it happens, I once met Heller at a party in New York, sometime in the 1990s. He was a likeable […]
America and Americans What do you get if you remove America (the idea) from America (the place]? What if you remove American values, enshrined in the Constitution, from American society? Equality, free speech, free belief, the rule of law—what if you take all that away? The obvious answer is Americans—those individual people. But what makes […]
A Scary Thought A scary thought crept into my head yesterday: What if MS-13 had supported Trump all along? What if they had praised and flattered him, called him their leader, wore MAGA hats? What if they had joined forces with the rioters on January 6th? What would be his attitude now? I really don’t […]