One of the most famous sentences in the Critique of Pure Reason is: ‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.’ (A51/B75) If we have a correct and thorough understanding of this sentences, we are already well on our way understanding Kant’s philosophical project. But to get there, we must delve a lot…

Here is a riddle I posted on Mastodon. If you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to think about it before reading on. You’re in a game show. There are three closed chests, 1, 2, and 3. One of them contains a prize, the other two are empty. You can choose one chest and…

I do not buy the Wittgensteinian claim that all philosophical problems are problem of language and disappear once we analyse our use of words. But some philosophical problems are like that. And one of them, I suspect, is the so-called problem of tensed token truths. (In this blog post, I’ll rely on a presentation of…

External world skepticism is usually set up by first presenting two scenarios that are indistinguishable from each other. One is the good ‘real world’ scenario that we believe ourselves to be in. The other is the bad ‘skeptical’ scenario. It could be an evil demon deceiving us, or it could be that we are a…

One of Hume’s most famous positions, defended in both A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, is that we cannot use reason to gain knowledge of any causal relation or any regularity in the world. Hume argues that causation — at least insofar as we can know it — is merely…

Can a crocodile and a rooster mate and get a young? Disappointingly, they cannot. It’s impossible. Of course this impossibility has to be established empirically, either by trying to get a rooster and a crocodile to mate; or, more plausibly, by developing an understanding of reproductive processes and genetics that allows us to say with…

I’ve just read The Sources of Normativity, the 1992 Tanner Lectures of Christine M. Korsgaard. The book was recommended to me by my colleague Tim Meijers after I came into his office bothering him about duties. Not his duties, but the nature of duties. See, I don’t really get duties; or rather, what I don’t…

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…