Feeling Philosophy Philosophy is an emotional subject. There are philosophical emotions. But are these emotions specific to philosophy or just instances of more general emotions? Is the emotional life of a philosopher essentially identical to that of a physicist or an historian, or is it a life of a different emotional […]
Necessity and Truth It is generally assumed that necessity implies truth: from “Necessarily p” we can infer “It is true that p”. In possible worlds terms, if a sentence is true in every world, it is true in the actual world. This is taken to be self-evident and to my […]
Skeletons of the Mind The skeletons of all mammals are said by biologists to be “homologous”. If you look at the skeleton of a bat, say, and compare it with the skeleton of a human or a dog, you find the same number and arrangement of bones (give or take a […]
The Concept of a Person I have come to the conclusion that the concept of a person, as philosophers employ that concept, is a bad concept. It leads to the formulation of bad questions that have no answers. The concept does not pick out any natural kind and is quite misleading. […]
Why Thoughts Cannot be Chemical Events The usual kinds of theoretical identity exhibit a common feature: we can give a compositional analysis of the thing being identified in terms of what it is being identified with. Thus in the case of “water is H2O” we can analyze water as composed […]
Turing Tests The classic Turing test involves a robot that passes for a conscious thinking human being. The examiner spends time with the robot, asking questions, interacting, and the question is whether it presents a convincing enough appearance of intelligence and consciousness. It is like an audition for playing the part […]
Transspeciesism Western society has grown extremely tolerant of a large variety of what we might call “life-ways”—ways in which people desire to live, by choice or genetic destiny. Unmarried parents, interracial marriage, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, bisexuals, transsexuals, and transvestites—all are now regarded as legitimate life-ways, to be respected and protected. […]
Polyamory and Identity Suppose I take myself to be in love with a single person but in reality there are two people that are the recipients of my affection. What I think to be one person is really a pair of identical twins; they have just never disclosed this fact […]
Possible Minds It is fair to say that today much of Freudian theory is not generally regarded as true (though it was believed to be true for most of the twentieth century–ardently so). Nevertheless, I think it would be accepted even by Freud’s contemporary critics (including myself) that his […]
A Picture of Mind How in the most general terms should we characterize the mind, animal or human? If the body has a respiratory system, a digestive system, and a reproductive system, what systems does the mind have? How does it divide up? What is its fundamental structure? I suggest the […]