Applause I once gave a lecture in Finland on externalism and twin earth cases. At the end there was a very brief burst of applause, lasting no more than two seconds. Afterwards I said to my Finnish friend Esa Saarinen that they must not have liked it much given the brevity of the response. On […]
Science Without Language Clearly, there could not be poems or novels or essays without language: these things consist of words arranged into sentences. Equally clearly, there could be athletic activities without language: football, high jumping, sprinting, badminton. People may talk as they engage in these activities, but they don’t consist in talking. Could there be […]
Administrators University administrators are rapidly becoming the most reviled people in America, and with good reason. When was the last time you heard of one making a good decision? It has always been thus, you say. But it is getting worse: atrocious decisions abound, heavy handedness is the norm, authoritarian attitudes prevail, academic freedom is […]
Age We have the wrong idea about age. We think too much in terms of bodily change and the passage of objective time. We can certainly talk about bodily age and temporal age, but we also need to recognize mental age—the age of a person’s mind. This may not correlate closely with the other two […]
Universities I am reading Mary McCarthy’s 1951 novel The Groves of Academe. It is a marvelous satire on university politics and pretensions, centering on one Henry Mulcahy, unjustly fired from his post. What is astonishing is how little things have changed in the interim, except for the worse. There is the rogues’ gallery of credulous […]
Index I thought it might be useful to provide a list of words that could be searched on this blog, in case people wanted to look up specific subject areas. Analysis, a priori, truth, meaning, knowledge, skepticism, reality, names, reference, fact, necessity, biology, psychology, physics, astronomy, science, philosophy, identity, existence, freedom, self, person, consciousness, intentionality, […]
Trumperica I claim no originality in asserting Trump’s abysmal character; it stares us in the face every day. Nasty, stupid, witless, bigoted—you name it, he has it. But, as is also ruefully noted, at least a third of the country thinks he is just fine. The point that is not observed, however, is that it […]
Retirement I once heard Michael Dummett remark that he was looking forward to retirement so that he could get some work done. My sentiments exactly: work has never been so sweet as it has been post-employment. You work on what you want to work on and you don’t have to break off to fulfill your […]
Is Water Disgusting? Wet feces are more disgusting than dry ones. Suppurating wounds are more disgusting than non-suppurating wounds. Blood is disgusting, so is urine, so is saliva. The waterier something is the more disgusting it becomes. It is hard to think of dry things that are disgusting. Liquidity makes for disgustingness. One would think, […]
Action as Selection The causal theory of action maintains that reasons cause actions, reasons being combinations of beliefs and desires. This doctrine is supposed to provide a uniform account of the “because” relation: action is produced in the same way any event is produced—by means of causation. Cars cause bridges to collapse; reasons cause actions—it […]