American Trump Perhaps I see the current catastrophe differently from others. To me it reveals and magnifies the worst American traits: stupidity, credulity, nastiness, thirst for violence, love of bullshit, childishness, amorality. I have seen these traits manifested so many times in my thirty-five years here that Trump’s rise hardly surprises me. Only in America […]
Double Death You might think there is nothing more to say about death. You might think death has been done to death. But I am here to report, from the depths of death studies, that death has a new wrinkle—it has a surprise up its sleeve. It turns out that every death is a double […]
The Selective Universe In The Origin of Species Darwin introduces the concept of natural selection via the concept of artificial selection. His idea is that nature operates in a manner analogous to human actions of selective breeding and cultivation. Variety is generated by both processes. Some breeds or phenotypes or species are favored by the […]
Autism and Philosophy Does philosophy cause autism? Does that question elicit a jolt of recognition? I don’t believe the matter has ever been investigated scientifically, but there is anecdotal evidence to support it. That the two are correlated is prima facie plausible, but does philosophy cause autism? Not florid cases of it, to be sure, […]
Bend Sinister Nabokov’s harrowing novel of that name is about political leaning to the left (“sinistral”). Bending sinister is supposed not to be a good thing to do (communism etc.). But we might also use the phrase to describe something more literal—leaning to the left hand. I have been bending sinister regularly. I am a […]
Axons, Dendrites, and Consciousness You may have heard the saying, “When you get down to brass tacks, these are the facts: birth, copulation, and death”. The sentiment is that these are the basic facts of human (and animal) life—the poles around which everything else revolves. I could paraphrase this in application to the brain as […]
Garbage and “Garbage” Biden has a ready and plausible answer to criticism of his “garbage” comment, viz. the use-mention distinction. He was quoting someone else’s use of the word not using it himself non-quotationally. He was enclosing it in what philosophers call scare-quotes. We could paraphrase him thus: “The only so called ‘garbage’ here are […]
The Brain-Brain Problem Time for some conceptual house-cleaning, or furniture-arranging. We have been talking about the mind-body problem all wrong; we need to bring our formulations up to date. We used not to know that the brain is the central mechanism of the mind; now we do. The mind is an aspect of the brain—mental […]
Kamala Harris I like Kamala, I really do. I think she is a highly intelligent capable person, and even quite likeable (I used to find her off-putting). I badly want her to win. I think she will make a fine president. But there is something she says regularly that really irritates me: she is forever […]
Abby Philip Strikes Again Last night was surely a turning point. Abby Philip’s nightly show features vigorous debate between pundits of the left and pundits of the right (usually the MAGA right). She handles it with the utmost integrity and intelligence (not to mention charm). I always dislike the right-wingers she has as guests—all of […]