Shark Attacks I recently read Francois Sarano’s excellent forthcoming book In the Name of Sharks (sent to me by the publishers because I wrote a review of a book about the octopus in the Wall Street Journal). It puts up a strong case for the preservation of shark populations in the face of dwindling numbers […]
Am I Certain That I Think? Descartes wanted to build human knowledge on a foundation of certainty. He thought the Cogito provided an instance of certainty, and many have agreed (Montaigne was there before him). Critics have argued that the conclusion of the Cogito doesn’t follow from the premise (the Lichtenberg objection). However, the premise […]
Seeming Seeming is a pervasive feature of conscious life. We (and other animals) are constant subjects of seeming: things are forever seeming this way or that to us. It now seems to me that there is a red cup in front of me, that Sebastian is in a good mood today, and that seeming is […]
A Philosophy of Seeming In “Seeming” I introduced seeming as a sui generis psychological natural kind. Here I will explore its uses in philosophical thought—the kind of impact it would have on philosophy were it to be taken seriously. I won’t repeat what I said in the earlier paper (this one should be read in […]
How to do Philosophy We are confronted by a world we don’t fully understand. We try by various methods to gain understanding of it, sometimes successfully. Philosophy is one such effort. Suppose we want to understand X: we talk about X, have thoughts about X, but we don’t know the nature of X, or the […]
Naming, Necessity, and Mind I propose to offer an interpretation of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity that has not (I believe) been offered before. I do not say that this interpretation consciously occurred to the author of that work—in fact, I think it didn’t. But I do claim that it illuminates what is going on argumentatively […]
Apropos the Knowledge Argument The knowledge argument tells us that complete physical knowledge of the world is not complete knowledge of the world—in particular, it is not complete knowledge of the mind. How interesting is this conclusion? It depends what we mean by “physical”. Suppose we mean “included in Newtonian physics”, with its talk of […]
The Age of Mystery Intellectual historians like to divide up the history of human thought into distinct periods and give them descriptive names: Antiquity, the Middle (Dark) Ages, the Early Modern Period, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, the Romantic Period, the Age of Analysis (I invented that one). But what […]
Life Saving It’s not every day that you save someone’s life. Some years ago, I was visited by the philosopher Amie Thomasson at my home on Miami Beach. We were doing water sports. She got into my waveski (a kayak for surfing). I instructed her not to put on the seatbelt until I had explained […]
Phenomenology of Death What is the phenomenology of death? What is it like to die? What does the final cessation of consciousness feel like? The answer is that there is no phenomenology of death, nothing it is like to die, no feeling of the end of consciousness. As Wittgenstein says, “Death is not an event […]