Archival Minds Richard Dawkins’ The Genetic Book of the Dead (2024) advances the thesis that an organism’s body is like a book describing ancestral environments. The genes encode facts about how the world was when the organism containing them evolved. We can thus infer the past state of things from the current state of an […]
On Cancelling Here is a thought experiment for you. Suppose your top ten philosophers had all been cancelled: removed from pedagogical employment, prevented from publishing, and generally shunned. This possibility could cover the philosophers of the last hundred years or of all time. Suppose that their thoughts had therefore never seen the light of day. […]
On Writing When I was a professor of philosophy working in a philosophy department, I used to jot down notes on ideas I had that seemed promising. I was too busy to write up the ideas properly, so I made the notes as reminders for later work. The exigencies of teaching had priority (a great […]
Correlational Semantics I will describe some possible uses of correlational semantics. I don’t say I subscribe to these uses; I offer them as a gift to those with anti-realist or fictionalist yearnings in certain areas. It may help ease some discomfort caused by such yearnings. Let’s begin with a relatively simple case: feature-placing sentences like […]
Are We Animals? I am interested in the concept animal, its analysis and role in our thinking and acting. I am also interested in the use of the word “animal”, its denotation, connotation, conversational implicatures, psychology, and sociology. These interests have a bearing on the ethical treatment of animals and on the nature of human […]
Ontology of Mind We have no clear ontology of the mental. We have no good way of talking generally about the mind. This has always been a source of awkwardness and embarrassment. We philosophers talk routinely of mental states, attributes, properties, traits, events, processes, and entities; but we volunteer very little in the way of […]
Semantical Considerations on Mental Language I am going to expound a view of the mind (and hence the mind-body problem) that I am disinclined to accept. Still, the view deserves careful articulation and may contain elements of truth; it should be added to the menu of options. And it is agreeably radical. It begins with […]
Philosophy at the Dentist Yesterday I was having a new crown fitted at the dentist (king at last!). It is not a pleasant procedure, though I’ve had worse. Apart from the discomfort, it is boring. I decided to try an experiment: see if I can think about philosophy while being drilled and scraped orally. Surprisingly, […]
Predicating and Necessity (Bear in mind Kripke’s Naming and Necessity when reading the following.) When a speaker uses a predicate (“man”, “cat”, “rose”, “square”, “red”, “runs”, “clever” etc.) he or she refers to a property or attribute: but how is this done? One answer is by means of ostension: the speaker points to an instance […]
Are There Two Types of Necessity? It used to be thought there was only one type of necessity, analytic necessity. All necessity is de dictonecessity, stemming from, and about, language. There is no necessity in the extralinguistic world; to suppose otherwise is a fallacy of projection. Necessity is in the head, a product of words […]