Pain, Consciousness, and Morality Consciousness (sentience) evolved at a certain time on planet Earth, many millions of years ago. It didn’t emerge all at once but piecemeal: a certain type of consciousness evolved first, with additions later. What was this type? We don’t know; we can only guess. What we do know is that, whatever […]
Coach Colin Redux I had an interesting experience yesterday. I arrived at the Biltmore tennis center for my daily practice and was confronted by a mob of high school students—not dressed in tennis gear. My first concern was whether this would interfere with my hitting session. As I parked my bicycle one of them, a […]
David Lewis I have in my possession a long letter from David Lewis replying to my paper “Modal Reality” (1981). Several years ago, I was contacted about this letter because no copy of it existed in Lewis’s files, but at that time I didn’t know where it was or even if it had survived. I […]
Romantic Harassment We hear a lot about sexual harassment these days, but not much about romantic harassment. Indeed, I just invented the phrase (and perhaps the concept). What is it? Suppose A falls in love with B and wants B to fall in love with him. He begins a series of efforts to secure this […]
Trumps How should we cope with Trump’s looming presidency? I think we need a conceptual switch: stop thinking of Trump as a man and start thinking of him instead as a disease. Trump is an epidemic that is sweeping the land. This disease has infected the minds of a great many people: they are suffering […]
Academic Freedom and Sex I apologize for discussing such a sordid subject. I don’t mean the subject of sex; I mean the threats to academic freedom this subject invites—from the right and the left. Nominally, we are all in favor of academic freedom, but that tolerance is apt to waver when sex is the topic. […]
Does Ethics Have a History? It might be thought obvious that it does: hasn’t ethical thought changed over time? What we used to find morally acceptable we now find abhorrent. But be careful: are you distinguishing right and wrong from our thought about right and wrong? Ethical thought certainly has a history, but does it […]
Confidence I came to America with a very positive attitude towards its people (naively optimistic, you might say). It wasn’t long before that confidence was shaken by personal experience. My confidence steadily eroded over the years (I name no names) with professional philosophers the main culprits. It culminated in my experiences of a decade ago. […]
Consciousness and Logical Form Consider the sentence “It is a necessary truth that for all conscious beings there is something it is like to be that being”. If we render this in standard logical notation, we have two quantifiers and a modal operator. These generate scope distinctions and hence alternative readings of the sentence—nine in […]
Language and Politics I remember it like yesterday—the day I first encountered pronoun mania. It was in London, the late Seventies, at a student party in the philosophy department of University College London, where I used to teach. A female (girl, woman) student told me she had enjoyed our tutorial on the analysis of knowledge […]