Does Ethics Have a History? It might be thought obvious that it does: hasn’t ethical thought changed over time? What we used to find morally acceptable we now find abhorrent. But be careful: are you distinguishing right and wrong from our thought about right and wrong? Ethical thought certainly has a history, but does it […]
Confidence I came to America with a very positive attitude towards its people (naively optimistic, you might say). It wasn’t long before that confidence was shaken by personal experience. My confidence steadily eroded over the years (I name no names) with professional philosophers the main culprits. It culminated in my experiences of a decade ago. […]
Consciousness and Logical Form Consider the sentence “It is a necessary truth that for all conscious beings there is something it is like to be that being”. If we render this in standard logical notation, we have two quantifiers and a modal operator. These generate scope distinctions and hence alternative readings of the sentence—nine in […]
Language and Politics I remember it like yesterday—the day I first encountered pronoun mania. It was in London, the late Seventies, at a student party in the philosophy department of University College London, where I used to teach. A female (girl, woman) student told me she had enjoyed our tutorial on the analysis of knowledge […]
Were You Ever Were you ever right When you arrived that night With your books and your guns With your daughters and sons Were you ever right You landed and looked You built and you cooked You cut down and burned You rampaged and spurned You landed and looked Did […]
Ex-Friends I have many ex-friends. Consider the case of Mark Rowlands: this is a person who I’ve known for forty years. I supervised him at Oxford; I asked him to contribute to a series I was editing on ethics; I brought him to Miami; I saw him every day for lunch when I was in […]
True Lies Suppose you see John steal a cookie. He did it and you saw him do it. However, you don’t believe that Johnstole the cookie because John disguised himself as Jack. You believe, falsely, that Jack stole the cookie. As it happens, you don’t like John so you decide to lie and say that […]
Fuck The word “fuck” has multiple uses. The OED gives us two definitions: “have sex with” and “damage or ruin”. Thus, we have “fuck up”, “fuck about”, “fuck with”, “fuck all”, “fuck off”, “fuck you”, “fucked”, “what the fuck?”, “cluster fuck”, “mind fuck”, “fuck face”, “fuckable”, “fuck!”, and so on. The two definitions are opposed […]
Meme Selection What kind of selection applies to memes? According to my scheme, there are two kinds of selection: intentional and nomological.[1] Suppose the meme is a jingle: if it takes up residence in your mind, is that an intentional act? Not generally, since jingles usually repeat themselves against your will. You don’t choose to […]
American Trump Perhaps I see the current catastrophe differently from others. To me it reveals and magnifies the worst American traits: stupidity, credulity, nastiness, thirst for violence, love of bullshit, childishness, amorality. I have seen these traits manifested so many times in my thirty-five years here that Trump’s rise hardly surprises me. Only in America […]