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 […]
The Symbolic Gene Everyone has heard of the genetic code. Here is a typical statement from Wikipedia: “The genetic code is the set of rules used by living cells to translate information encoded within genetic material (DNA or RNA sequences of nucleotide triplets, or codons) into proteins…The codons specify which amino acid will be added […]
Bill Maher on Universities Bill Maher unleashed a diatribe against American universities last night, especially elite ones, mainly prompted by recent events concerning Israel. He blamed various cultural influences and what now passes for scholarship. There is now a good deal of agreement with this (I certainly agree with it). I want to add that […]
A Causal World There are two ways to think about causation: either it is something that exists in addition to an antecedent reality of objects and properties or it is constitutive of reality. According to the first way, if you removed causation from the world, you would be left with constant conjunction, a real world […]
Identity Amid Difference What is the most fundamental fact about reality? Is it that the world is the totality of facts (not things)? Is it that reality divides into particulars and universals? Is it the spatiotemporal manifold? The substance-accident distinction? Events and processes? The plurality of possible worlds? These are reasonable answers to a good […]
Political Evil and the Family What is the psychology of political evil, including political violence? By “political evil” I mean evil directed towards groups, as opposed to specific individuals: races, nationalities, religions, party affiliation, educational attainment, style of dress, etc. This kind of evil has a distinctive intentionality: whereas individual-directed intentionality takes in a concrete […]
Anatomy of a Proposition In his Notebooks 1914-1916 Wittgenstein writes as follows: “My whole task consists in explaining the nature of the proposition” (39) and “All this would get solved of itself if we understood the nature of the proposition” (33). He clearly thinks we don’t understand the nature of the proposition and that there […]