Contradictory Being Non-being looks like it cannot be. Being is always positive, never negative. It never contains lacks or absences or negations. There are no “negative facts”: actualities with not-ness built into them. Negation belongs with language, mental acts, not with objective reality. There is no such thing as nothingness. Yet negation is real; it’s […]
The Symbolic Gene Everyone has heard of the genetic code. Here is a typical statement from Wikipedia: “The genetic code is the set of rules used by living cells to translate information encoded within genetic material (DNA or RNA sequences of nucleotide triplets, or codons) into proteins…The codons specify which amino acid will be added […]
Bill Maher on Universities Bill Maher unleashed a diatribe against American universities last night, especially elite ones, mainly prompted by recent events concerning Israel. He blamed various cultural influences and what now passes for scholarship. There is now a good deal of agreement with this (I certainly agree with it). I want to add that […]
A Causal World There are two ways to think about causation: either it is something that exists in addition to an antecedent reality of objects and properties or it is constitutive of reality. According to the first way, if you removed causation from the world, you would be left with constant conjunction, a real world […]
Identity Amid Difference What is the most fundamental fact about reality? Is it that the world is the totality of facts (not things)? Is it that reality divides into particulars and universals? Is it the spatiotemporal manifold? The substance-accident distinction? Events and processes? The plurality of possible worlds? These are reasonable answers to a good […]
Political Evil and the Family What is the psychology of political evil, including political violence? By “political evil” I mean evil directed towards groups, as opposed to specific individuals: races, nationalities, religions, party affiliation, educational attainment, style of dress, etc. This kind of evil has a distinctive intentionality: whereas individual-directed intentionality takes in a concrete […]
Anatomy of a Proposition In his Notebooks 1914-1916 Wittgenstein writes as follows: “My whole task consists in explaining the nature of the proposition” (39) and “All this would get solved of itself if we understood the nature of the proposition” (33). He clearly thinks we don’t understand the nature of the proposition and that there […]
Accent Philosophy I propose to open up a new field of philosophy: accent philosophy—the philosophy of accents.[1] This may sound like a dull subject, but in fact it sets the pulses racing: for accents penetrate to the heart of what we are as human beings–as living, breathing, speaking people. It is actually a deeply political […]
States of Affairs The form of words “state of affairs” is a very odd phrase, and yet it is used primitively in metaphysical theories. What is an “affair” and what is a “state” of one of these?[1] People talk of their financial and romantic affairs, but do ordinary objects have affairs that are in a […]
On the Concept of a Conceptual Scheme The phrase “conceptual scheme”, as it is used in philosophy, anthropology, and the history of ideas, is intended to signify a particular conception of the conceptualizing mind, namely that our ways of thinking of the world are contingent, variable, and sometimes non-translatable.[1] That is, as a result of […]