Benefits of Cancellation Cancellation does have its upside. During the last ten years (it has been that long) I have had far more time to think, write philosophy, read (by choice), and pursue other interests. None of this would have been possible without ceasing to be a fulltime professor. This blog is one result. Not […]
Character and Consciousness It would be good to have a philosophy of character analogous to the philosophy of action or perception or emotion or thought or imagination or consciousness or the self. But we don’t. The subject hardly exists. I will take some steps to remedy that, focusing on the relationship between character and consciousness. […]
Aspects of Meaning Many theories of meaning have been propounded, each seeming to have some merit. But only one theory can be true, so some have to be rejected—or so we suppose. I will contest this. Things are more complicated, more nuanced. Among the theories defended we have: truth conditions, verification conditions, linguistic use, speaker […]
Analyzing Use If meaning is use, then a theory of meaning is a description of use not an analysis of sense. This is the message of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, as commonly understood. Instead of analyzing what a sentence means, breaking it into parts, providing necessary and sufficient conditions, we should aim for a perspicuous description […]
Analysis of a Sentence It is a useful exercise, for those interested in language, to list the various ways in which a sentence can be analyzed, in order to gain a full appreciation of how multi-faceted a sentence is.[1] Strangely, I have never seen this done. As an example, I will choose the sentence “Miami […]
Philosophy and Thought It is often said that philosophy is, or ought to be, concerned with thought. It is then contended, by some, that it should be concerned with language, since language provides our only access to thought.[1] Hence, the linguistic turn. A contrast is thereby presupposed: between science and philosophy. Science deals with external […]
Analytic Philosophy as Phenomenology Phenomenology lies in a long tradition stemming from Descartes and including Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Mill, Brentano, and Wundt. It has a number of distinguishing features, as developed by Husserl: it is based on “intuitions”; it is concerned with phenomena not hidden realities (e.g., Kantian noumena); it aims to discover essences; […]
Andrew Cuomo was on Bill Maher last night. It turns out all that Me-Too stuff about him was rubbish. Has anyone apologized? Has the New York Times admitted its mistake? Of course not. It was all politics and hysteria, after all. This was quite obvious to the discerning person at the time, but people preferred […]
Intentionality and the Ego In The Transcendence of the Ego (1936) Sartre criticizes Husserl’s conception of consciousness. I intend to add to this critique. Husserl supposes that in addition to the usual objects of consciousness there exists a further object christened the “transcendental ego”: it is the reference of “I”, the source of the unity […]
Contradictory Being Non-being looks like it cannot be. Being is always positive, never negative. It never contains lacks or absences or negations. There are no “negative facts”: actualities with not-ness built into them. Negation belongs with language, mental acts, not with objective reality. There is no such thing as nothingness. Yet negation is real; it’s […]