An Argument Against Skepticism The skeptic claims that we are wrong to credit ourselves with knowledge. Our belief that we possess knowledge is a false belief: we make an error when we ascribe knowledge to ourselves. But why do we make this error? On this question the skeptic is strangely silent: we are not told […]
Astronomy, Mysticism, and Mechanism Astronomy has always been linked with mysticism. The gods of the sun, moon, and stars; the belief in astrology; the supposed geometrical perfection of celestial motions; the Empyrean Heaven; the spiritual meaning of celestial phenomena; the awe inspired by the “starry heavens” (Kant); the assumption of a superlunary realm of being […]
Novels Someone once described my first novel Bad Patches as a “punk existentialist” novel. I thought this an apt description. Written in the early Eighties, when punk was still alive and kicking in the UK (“Anarchy In”), the central character, Dave Green, is abrasive, abusive, resentful, unpleasant to be around, and generally repellent—though not without […]
Einstein and Hume It is well known that Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity was influenced by his reading of Hume’s Treatise. People sometimes applaud this for revealing Einstein’s openness to philosophy. To me it suggests a different lesson. Einstein will have read Hume from the perspective of contemporary positivism, interpreting him accordingly. A.J. Ayer also […]
Easy and Hard Problems It has become customary to speak of “the hard problem of consciousness” and “easy problems [of consciousness]”. I think this is an unhelpful way to talk; it is too simple-minded. In the first place, we should not say that consciousness itself is a hard problem; rather, its relation to the brain […]
Value Realism and Metaphysical Mystery Probably the central question in ethical theory, and the most difficult, is whether value is objective. Is pain, for example, intrinsically bad or is this just how we describe it? Was pain bad before there was anyone around to think it bad? If pain is objectively bad, what kind of […]
Existentialist Ethics and Value Realism By “existentialist ethics” I mean ethical theories according to which ethical precepts or principles are determined by the moral agent’s acts of choice and have no basis in objective reality. They are imposed not encountered, invented not discovered, projected not detected, endogenous not exogenous, subjective not objective, human not extra-human, […]
Four Women I have just read Benjamin Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something and found it an interesting and readable book. I met Elizabeth Anscombe and knew Philippa Foot and admired Iris Murdoch from afar. There seems to be a subtext to the book that is never explicitly stated, namely that it was their […]
Necessity and Time What is the connection between necessity and time? Time is not usually mentioned in discussions of necessity, but it is easy to see that the two notions are logically connected. If a proposition is necessary, then it is true at all times. In fact, it is necessarily true at all times: it […]
Notes on Creativity It is a curious fact that creativity is both extremely common and also very rare. Everyone has it to a marked degree, but it is not given to everyone to be markedly creative. It is both easy and difficult, effortless and effortful. How can this be? The areas in which it is […]