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 […]
Index I thought it might be useful to provide a list of words that could be searched on this blog, in case people wanted to look up specific subject areas. Analysis, a priori, truth, meaning, knowledge, skepticism, reality, names, reference, fact, necessity, biology, psychology, physics, astronomy, science, philosophy, identity, existence, freedom, self, person, consciousness, intentionality, […]
Trumperica I claim no originality in asserting Trump’s abysmal character; it stares us in the face every day. Nasty, stupid, witless, bigoted—you name it, he has it. But, as is also ruefully noted, at least a third of the country thinks he is just fine. The point that is not observed, however, is that it […]
Retirement I once heard Michael Dummett remark that he was looking forward to retirement so that he could get some work done. My sentiments exactly: work has never been so sweet as it has been post-employment. You work on what you want to work on and you don’t have to break off to fulfill your […]
Is Water Disgusting? Wet feces are more disgusting than dry ones. Suppurating wounds are more disgusting than non-suppurating wounds. Blood is disgusting, so is urine, so is saliva. The waterier something is the more disgusting it becomes. It is hard to think of dry things that are disgusting. Liquidity makes for disgustingness. One would think, […]
Action as Selection The causal theory of action maintains that reasons cause actions, reasons being combinations of beliefs and desires. This doctrine is supposed to provide a uniform account of the “because” relation: action is produced in the same way any event is produced—by means of causation. Cars cause bridges to collapse; reasons cause actions—it […]
Can the Universities Survive? There is a crisis at American universities: a crisis of stupidity. It has been brewing for a while, but it intensified beginning around 2012. How much stupidity can a university take before it ceases to be a university, before it collapses under the weight of its own stupidity? The DEI craze […]
Free Mind Philosophers of free will usually focus on bodily action. Does anything change if we switch to purely mental actions such as thinking and imagining? Suppose a man is imprisoned: we would normally say that he is not free to do what he wants as far as his body is concerned, but he is […]
Cosmological Phenomenology There are many types of intentional object, each with its associated phenomenology: physical, psychological, mathematical, linguistic, ethical, aesthetic, spatial, temporal, non-existent. I will be concerned with a rather extensive object—the universe. How does the universe present itself to consciousness? What suite of seeming (if I may put it so) is peculiar to this […]
Developmental Philosophy of Mind Developmental philosophy of mind is an undeveloped field. There are two questions: phylogenetic and ontogenetic. How did the mind as it now exists develop over evolutionary time, and how does it develop in the individual? Like developmental psychology, it is natural to adopt a stage conception of these processes: what stages […]