Four Types of Quantification It has been said that there are really two types of quantification not one: “objectual” and “substitutional”. The objectual type may be paraphrased as follows: “There is an object x such that x satisfies F, where F is a predicate” (and similarly for the universal quantifier). The substitutional type may be […]
Stock and Tuvel I was just watching a video of Kathleen Stock and Rebecca Tuvel at Cornell talking about their experiences in academia in recent years. Both women struck me as eminently sensible and decent people with perfectly defensible (and innocuous) views. Yet they have been subjected to vicious persecution and cancellation by assorted idiots. […]
The Situation Room I just read my friend George Stephanopoulos’ book The Situation Room, an account of said room over the last sixty years or so. It is a well-researched, clear, and smoothly written book, full of information, eye-opening. As a window into American politics over the relevant time period, it is exemplary; everyone in […]
Albert Einstein: Logical Positivist In chapter 3 of Relativity (1916) Einstein writes: “We entirely shun the vague word ‘space’, of which we must honestly acknowledge, we cannot form the slightest conception, and replace it by ‘motion relative to a practically rigid body of reference’” (22). Overlooking the use-mention error, Einstein is stating, as if self-evident, […]
Friendship In our society we treat romantic and friend relationships differently. Romantic relationships go through predictable stages, often culminating in marriage: they progress to the point where a legal contract is in order. But friendship does not follow this course: it develops but it doesn’t culminate in a legal contract, or any kind of contract. […]
Applause I once gave a lecture in Finland on externalism and twin earth cases. At the end there was a very brief burst of applause, lasting no more than two seconds. Afterwards I said to my Finnish friend Esa Saarinen that they must not have liked it much given the brevity of the response. On […]
Science Without Language Clearly, there could not be poems or novels or essays without language: these things consist of words arranged into sentences. Equally clearly, there could be athletic activities without language: football, high jumping, sprinting, badminton. People may talk as they engage in these activities, but they don’t consist in talking. Could there be […]
Administrators University administrators are rapidly becoming the most reviled people in America, and with good reason. When was the last time you heard of one making a good decision? It has always been thus, you say. But it is getting worse: atrocious decisions abound, heavy handedness is the norm, authoritarian attitudes prevail, academic freedom is […]
Age We have the wrong idea about age. We think too much in terms of bodily change and the passage of objective time. We can certainly talk about bodily age and temporal age, but we also need to recognize mental age—the age of a person’s mind. This may not correlate closely with the other two […]
Universities I am reading Mary McCarthy’s 1951 novel The Groves of Academe. It is a marvelous satire on university politics and pretensions, centering on one Henry Mulcahy, unjustly fired from his post. What is astonishing is how little things have changed in the interim, except for the worse. There is the rogues’ gallery of credulous […]