My Favorite People A disadvantage of knowing great people is that you miss them when they are gone. This is a list of people I’ve known, living and dead, that stand out in my mind for one reason or another. I could easily write an essay about each of them detailing our friendship. I will […]
Life Forms as Synthetic Wholes It is a common idea that animal bodies (also plant bodies) are synthetic wholes consisting of separate organs. There are about a dozen of these in the mammalian body, depending on how you count. Each is different from the others but they work together to compose a functioning body. They […]
Scientific Philosophy Is philosophy a scientific subject? I don’t mean barroom bromides (“My philosophy is live and let live”); I mean academic philosophy. Here I intend to include the usual subject areas including ethics and aesthetics. The best way to answer this question is to ask what the word “science” is taken to contrast with. […]
Lies, Lies, and More Lies I usually avoid commenting on politics, but every rule has its exceptions. I have been watching a lot of politics on TV, especially Abby Philip’s nightly program on CNN. She is an exemplary presenter: deeply intelligent, amazingly well-informed, and invariably polite (also lovely to look at—that quizzical smile). She always […]
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 […]