America: A Theory Gotten: Americans say it, the British don’t (nor do Australians and South Africans). One might suppose that Americans started saying it some time after the first British settlers landed in the New World, thus marking themselves as different from their British forebears. But this is wrong: the British were […]
[1] There is certainly something liberating and amusing about nonsense: hence the popularity of the likes of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Nonsense has its value, its virtues. It is hard to define, but we know it when we see it. It isn’t the same as mere impossibility, but is closer to the notion of […]
Notes on Nonsense We don’t talk about nonsense enough. Let’s show it some respect. Nonsense belongs to language not reality: there are no nonsensical facts or objects or properties; there are only nonsensical words or strings thereof. Reality itself is completely…what? We have no word for the opposite of “nonsensical”—the word “sensical” […]
Dreaming and Philosophy I have an empirical hypothesis: dreaming caused philosophy. That is, it was dreaming that tipped our ancestors off to philosophical questions, and it still does. Dreaming embodies so much of what stimulates philosophical thought; it’s the cradle of philosophy. Not all of it, to be sure, philosophy being a […]
Trying: Its Scope and Limits What can we try to do and what can’t we try to do? The OED defines “try” as “to make an attempt or effort to do something”, so our question becomes what can we make an attempt to do. The following come within the scope of trying: bodily and […]
Dualities I wish to draw attention to a duality that runs through many areas of philosophy and elsewhere. It is a very abstract duality and it is not easy to find words to pin it down; yet it seems real and important. Here is a list in which the duality is apparent: volition […]
A Theory of the Unconscious From a biological point of view, the mind is a problem-solving device: the problem of finding food, the problem of avoiding predators, the problem of reproducing and raising offspring. That’s why the mind exists—to solve problems. Sometimes we consciously reflect on problems, using Rational Thought. The problems can […]
Persistence Through Time In virtue of what do material objects persist through time? This is not a difficult question to answer: the particles composing the object must persist through time (enough of them anyway) and they must stay spatially related to each other in the same way over time (to a sufficient degree). […]
Bad Utilitarianism There are those who believe we have a moral obligation to donate a substantial part of our wealth to foreign aid if the net utility of doing so is maximized. Thus we should give away (say) 10% of our wealth to charity, even if we are not well off by local standards. […]
Music and Language The analogies and connections between music and language are striking. This is most apparent in the case of song, but it applies quite generally. Music is made up of notes, phrases, bars, tunes, riffs, verses, movements, symphonies, operas, albums, etc. It has compositional structure. It proceeds from a finite […]