Digestion, Learning, and Dreams The word “digestion” (or “digest”) is apt to suggest to modern ears the process by which food is converted to bodily tissue. But it also has another meaning: the process by which information received by the senses is converted into knowledge—as in “That’s a lot (of information) to digest”. The dictionary […]
Defining Time Can time be defined? Einstein and Bergson had an argument about this: Einstein claimed to define time by clocks (“time pieces”), i.e., by physical objects of a certain type; Bergson preferred to define time by means of consciousness of time (“subjective duration”). Time exists by virtue of clocks, natural and artificial, for Einstein; […]
Degrees of Intention Does intending come in degrees? The question seems odd and to admit of only one answer—it does not. We don’t talk this way (“I half intend to drink a beer”, “Do you strongly intend to go to the shops?”). Intending is like knowing: you don’t weakly or partially know a fact—you either […]
A Puzzle about Desire (and Intention etc.) In “A Puzzle about Belief” Kripke introduces his puzzle about belief as a puzzle about belief—specifically, the behavior of names in belief contexts. I will contend that it is a not a puzzle about belief specifically and not about names specifically; that is just one version of the […]
Parasites and Disgust What is the evolutionary origin of the emotion of disgust, along with its behavioral expression? Why was it selected? I will suggest that parasites played a vital role.[1] A desideratum of any theory is to distinguish disgust from two other emotions easily confused with it: fear and aesthetic revulsion. Fear is much […]
Life: A Synthesis I am going to attempt something both ambitious and modest: synthesize the various elements of the Dawkinsian view of life as we know it. We are familiar (I hope) with the pillars of the Dawkins’ world-view (zoological philosophy): the selfish gene, the extended phenotype, the genetic book of the dead (the textual […]
Economics and Ethics Economics is the domain of the selfish. Ethics is the domain of the selfless. So we have been schooled to think. In economic activity (exchange, purchase) we acquire goods: we benefit from what we receive; we get what we want. The act is essentially selfish—self-interested, even greedy. Ethics doesn’t come into it, […]
Archival Minds Richard Dawkins’ The Genetic Book of the Dead (2024) advances the thesis that an organism’s body is like a book describing ancestral environments. The genes encode facts about how the world was when the organism containing them evolved. We can thus infer the past state of things from the current state of an […]
On Cancelling Here is a thought experiment for you. Suppose your top ten philosophers had all been cancelled: removed from pedagogical employment, prevented from publishing, and generally shunned. This possibility could cover the philosophers of the last hundred years or of all time. Suppose that their thoughts had therefore never seen the light of day. […]
On Writing When I was a professor of philosophy working in a philosophy department, I used to jot down notes on ideas I had that seemed promising. I was too busy to write up the ideas properly, so I made the notes as reminders for later work. The exigencies of teaching had priority (a great […]