Formal Languages and Natural Languages Philosophers of language have argued over the relationship between so-called formal languages and natural languages (the kind people regularly speak). Some say formal languages supply the underlying logical form of the sentences of natural languages; some say formal languages improve on natural languages; some […]
Forced Knowledge We are schooled in various dichotomies dividing up the field of human knowledge: a priori versus a posterioriknowledge, infallible versus fallible knowledge, implicit versus explicit knowledge, innate versus acquired knowledge, basic versus derived knowledge, and so on. These are all worthy of the attention of the […]
Footnotes to Plato “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” This remark from Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Pt. II, ch. 1, sec. 1) is frequently cited, either as a tribute to Plato’s greatness or as an […]
Extended Anatomy It is customary to distinguish between an organism’s body and its environment. The environment is what exists outside the body. There is a definite boundary between the two. But how solid is this distinction? And does it matter to theoretical biology? Might there be a better way to carve things […]
Explanations of Life Suppose we encounter life forms on another planet unrelated to ours and possibly quite unlike ours. Still, there is evident adaptive complexity, so that the laws of physics and chance cannot explain what we observe. What possible explanation might be given for this complexity? How might it […]
Essentially Negative Concepts Negation is a basic and ubiquitous element of our conceptual scheme, though it is hard to say anything illuminating about it. Beyond noting that it is a unary truth function we find little to report about the nature of negation. We feel vaguely that it consists in a […]
Epistemology Personalized What is it that is justified? Not propositions: they are true or false, but it would be strange to say that a proposition is justified independently of anyone believing it to be true (or probable). Was the heliocentric theory justified before anyone had any beliefs about it? It was […]
Divine Supervenience I wish to broach an extremely speculative theological question: Is God supervenient on the universe. More precisely, are the properties of God uniquely determined by the properties of the universe? Does any universe qualitatively identical to our universe in all its non-divine attributes contain a god that is qualitatively identical […]
There is something surprising about the Cogito: it is not merely trivially true like, “I think, therefore I have states of mind” or “I think, therefore there is a non-empty set of my thoughts”. What is it that is surprising? Not the claim that I have thoughts, and not the claim that I […]
Descartes without Dualism There is something right about Descartes’ metaphysics of mind and body and something wrong. He is right in supposing there is a kind of symmetrical duality with respect to mind and body, but wrong in supposing there is a corresponding dualism of substances. A body is an extended […]