I look out of the window and see that it rains. I judge that it rains. Now my colleague Thomas Fossen (in his new book, Facing Authority) tells me that judgement is different depending on practical consequences. My judgement that the Putin regime is illegitimate is not the same as a Russian person’s judgement that…

Here is one way to formulate what is at stake in the quarrel between disjunctivists and conjunctivists in the philosophy of perception. According to conjunctivists, the mental act in which I am engaged when I see a red apple and when I merely seem to see a red apple is the same act. There is…

Here is an example of a metaphysical dispute in contemporary analytic philosophy: there are presentists, who say that only the present exists and the past and the future do not, and there are eternalists, who say that the past, present and future all exist. Questions can arise about whether this dispute is substantive. Could it…

It’s by now a familiar argument: thinkers of what might be called a ‘relativist’, ‘postmodern’ or ‘anti-realist’ bent get accused of having corrupted science and society, leading to naked ideology in the universities and a blatant disregard for truth in the public sphere. While few will believe that Trump and his followers have deeply studied…

Do things have intrinsic value? If there are things out there that have intrinsic value, doesn’t that mean that we are lucky to be living in a world that contains such things? Could those same things also exist without the value built into them? How do we detect the value in things? All of these…

We are finite knowers. This is a platitude. But it easy to lose sight of what the platitude means. Part of what it means is that we do not know everything; that the amount of things we know is finite — perhaps in the mathematical sense of the term, but certainly, and more importantly, in…

I recently wrote about the unity of Kant’s cognitive powers. Just now I was reading an article by Arata Hamawaki, “Cartesian Skepticism, Kantian Skepticism, and Two Conceptions of Self-consciousness”, published in The Logical Alien: Conant and his Critics, edited by Sofia Miguens. Hamawaki writes something that may seem to contradict the claims that I made…

Recently somebody on Twitter (using the handle @robotsneedpoems) complained to me about the Critique of Pure Reason: It’s crazy to me how confident K[ant] is in his ability to discern discrete cognitive faculties just by reasoning them out. He keeps plowing ahead, constructing a mind-numbingly complex account out of more or less thin air. I…

David Lewis, in his 1986 book On the Plurality of Worlds, argues that properties are sets. Any property should be taken as “the set of all its instances — all of them, this- and other-worldly alike. Thus the property of being a donkey comes out as the set of all donkeys, the donkeys of other…

In his blog post ‘The End of Analytic Philosophy’, Liam Bright paints a starkly pessimistic — almost Spenglerian — view of the current state of what we still call analytic philosophy. I choose that last phrase with care. Once there may have been a coherent conception of philosophy as the discipline whose task it is…