Family Resemblances and Skeptical Solutions We all remember Wittgenstein’s famous sections on games and family resemblance; I won’t repeat them. The point I want to make is that they can be construed as providing a skeptical solution to a skeptical problem. Not that Wittgenstein saw them this way; on the contrary, he had no notion […]
Existence, Consciousness, and Skeptical Solutions There are straight solutions and skeptical solutions, skeptical paradoxes and skeptical arguments. They need not all take the same form; they just need to be cases in which something we uncritically assumed comes into doubt and is rescued by lowering theoretical expectations. X isn’t really the kind of thing you […]
Why I Publish Here The reasons are pretty obvious. First, I have been academically cancelled, so I find it difficult these days to get my work published in the usual places. Second, and equally important, the form of my recent writing is not standard academic form: it is concise, reference-free, and straight to the point. […]
Philosophical Superiority It has come to my attention (AI told me) that many people out there think it was very arrogant (and deluded) of me to claim superiority to the great dead philosophers. Such people (if they exist) have got hold of the wrong end of the stick: my statement, properly understood, is trivially true, […]
Mathematical Ethics You might not think that ethics is a very mathematical subject, unlike (say) physics. But we do have the felicific calculus which purports to quantify the rightness of an action according to the amount of happiness (pleasure) produced by it. The quantified variables include intensity, duration, extent, and correlated pain. And this idea […]
Philosophy of… I wish to point out an oddity in the way a typical philosophy curriculum is structured, which calls for revision. We normally distinguish the philosophy of mind from the philosophy of psychology: the former deals directly with the mind, the latter with the science of psychology (it is about that science). Philosophy of […]
Metaphysics of Shape and Color How many shapes are there in the universe, and how many colors? A standard answer is infinitely many in both cases. This answer is not incorrect, but it doesn’t go deep enough. Metaphysically, we want to know how many irreducible shapes and colors there are. As a matter of basic […]
In His Own Right I just re-read John Lennon’s book In His Own Write, which I won as the English prize at my school in Blackpool. I last read it at age sixteen, sixty years ago. It consists of short stories composed of malapropisms and invented words. I still found it as clever and funny […]
A Proof of Platonism I am going to prove that the universal whiteness is not identical to the class of white things. The proof is similar to the well-known proof that pain is not identical to C-fiber firing.[1] Thus: I can think of whiteness apart from the class of actual white things; I can conceive […]
Car Evolution Suppose a particular car is designed and built. No other car is created. The car is then copied by technicians multiple times over many years, say one thousand. Errors in the copying are sometimes made, resulting in a car slightly different from the original. Suppose a million new cars are built, so many […]