Football Mania I have been enjoying the World Cup these last couple of weeks, apart from the horrendous English accents of some of the commentators (one of whom insists on calling it the World Kep). I have been impressed by the level of skill exhibited, even by England, but especially by Congo. But what really […]
Greetings Colin – thanks for sending this: a) Loved this line: “Physics is an ontological mess for all its mathematical sophistication, but biology is on solid ontological ground.” b) Here’s a source reference for that Elizabeth Anscombe line: “The high success of Newton’s astronomy was in one way an intellectual disaster: it produced an illusion from […]
Laws and Nature When Newton brought all motion under a single set of laws, he changed our view of nature. Now nature was uniform, seamless, of a piece. These laws were mathematical, so nature was mathematical. The natural kind corresponding to these laws was a mathematical kind. Mass, force, and velocity were mathematical kinds, definable […]
Biology and Physics Biology and physics are very different types of science, but why is this—and is it remediable? Are they essentially different, or is it just a historical contingency? Physics as we have it is highly mathematical, consisting of strict mathematically formulated fundamental laws, expressed as equations; biology is not very mathematical, employs loose […]
Rigidity and Necessity The idea of rigid designation was one of Kripke’s best ideas in Naming and Necessity, but he didn’t explore it in much depth. I will rectify that omission, putting rigidity in its proper place. It will turn out to be both more familiar and less well understood than we have been led […]
The Subjective Mind(-View) How subjective is our view of the mind, our own and other’s? How much are we skewed and limited by our given viewing faculties and conceptual resources? We have a view of the physical world—a picture, a conception—and we can ask how subjective it is, i.e., how dependent on our peculiar sensory […]
Ontology of Psychology Every subject has its basic ontology—its preferred subject matter, the things it takes to exist, what it is committed to. In physics it is macroscopic bodies, particles, and fields (including forces); in astronomy it is stars, planets, and black holes; in chemistry it is molecules and chemical reactions; in biology it is […]
Philosophy of Learning In philosophy we study perception, knowledge, belief, memory, and reasoning—but not so much learning. In psychology learning is central, but in philosophy it is peripheral at best (perhaps part of philosophy of education). I propose to make some programmatic remarks about learning as a philosophical topic (I happen to have a strong […]
Ana Navarro and Me Last Saturday, I by chance ran into Ana Navarro in Milams supermarket in Miami. She doesn’t know me from Adam. I said hello to her and we had a pleasant conversation in the aisles there. She was as charming and delightful as you would expect. It turns out she lives near […]
Skeptical Solutions to the Mind Problem Early thinkers had a body problem: what is body? What is the stuff we call “matter”? The pre-Socratics had a go at answering this question: matter is water, or variations on the four elements (earth, fire, water, and air). More advanced thinkers proposed invisible atoms, or spatial extension, or […]