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 […]
Stephen Hawking: Logical Positivist Reading Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell (2001), I came upon the following passage: “Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other concept, should in my opinion be based on the most workable philosophy of science: the positivist approach put forward by Karl Popper and others. According […]
Is the Universe Large? If you study astronomy, it will be impressed upon you that the universe is large—very very very large, unimaginably so. The galaxies, their number, the distance between them, the travel times (even for light)—the universe is an extremely big object, much bigger than you thought, much bigger than anyone thought until […]
Bad Philosophers Time for a bit of academic sociology. Who are the world’s worst philosophers? I don’t mean which individual philosophers from within philosophy; I mean academics in other fields who like to comment on philosophy. What disciplines produce the worst philosophical commentators? We have quite a full list to choose from: physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, […]
Proof of an External World Kant famously (and ruefully) remarked that it was a scandal of philosophy that it has been unable to come up with a proof of the external world. He was right: it is a matter of some embarrassment that philosophy should be unable to prove something so obvious, so commonsensical. What […]
Subjective and Objective The distinction between subjective and objective is often used in philosophy, but it is less often articulated, still less analyzed.[1] I will do that. The task is not particularly difficult, though there are glitches to be ironed out. The distinction is well-founded and its basic nature easily understood. We can begin with […]