A New Religion Every religion needs a deity, a prophet, and a set of doctrines. These should, if possible, all be absurd, mildly exotic, and essentially arbitrary. The religion needs to appeal to the imagination of children so that they can be easily indoctrinated in its tenets. It should demonstrate a boldness of […]
Mind Maps Animals have bodies but they also have maps of bodies in their brains. They know the layout of their own body—topographic somatic representations. This is the basis of what is called proprioception. These representations are not discursive but model-like. They provide the animal with an innate awareness of its body […]
Pets I have two cats, four birds, fifteen fish, and one lizard. The cats are called Lucy and Blackie, both male, with quite different personalities (one a rabid hunter, the other a homebody). The birds are parakeets–white, blue, turquoise, and yellow. I have trained the yellow one (she has no name) to perch on […]
Immaterial Substance We already face a problem: what is meant by “immaterial” and what is meant by “substance”? I will bypass all this to raise a clearer question: is there a significant analogy between the structure of material objects (meaning middle-sized dry goods) and the structure of minds? By “structure” I mean […]
Mental and Physical The way philosophers use the terms “mental” and “physical” presupposes a conceptual dichotomy with no overlap: what is mental is not physical and what is physical is not mental (except by dint of some speculative metaphysical doctrine such as idealism or materialism). But is that the way we normally […]
American Psyche Suppose you wanted to explain why it is that people in America speak English. America is far from England and its native people were not English speakers. The obvious answer is that Americans speak the language of the British immigrants who founded the country. They spoke English and their descendants […]
Cosmic Compression Many a student of cosmology reels at the idea of the universe squeezed into a tiny dense point. How could all the matter (and space!) of the known universe be condensed into such a point? There is just too much of it! Our student is not bemused by another feat of […]
Big Bang Metaphysics Metaphysics typically deals with the universe as it now exists: material objects, space, time, mind, moral values, and so on. But it wasn’t always like that: at the time of the big bang it was very different and didn’t include any of those things. Shouldn’t there also be a […]
Reply to Michael Huemer I had hoped to send this reply to Huemer by email but the department website apparently blocks email sent to faculty (I have no idea why). So with some reluctance I am posting it here in the hope that it comes to his attention. Dear Professor Huemer, I […]
Is the World Vague? Either the world is intrinsically vague or our words and concepts are but the world is not. We say that “bald” is a vague predicate and bald is a vague concept. We don’t mean they are vague as such—that the predicate is a vague linguistic entity and the concept […]