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The books (2022)
Full list of all the books I read (and finished) in 2022. With 72 books, it’s the most reading I’ve done in a long time. A good mix of books I just read to relax at times when I was tired (Zelazny, Van Gulik) and some really good fiction, philosophy and other non-fiction. Anonymous, De…
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Disjunctivism, acts, and attempts
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…
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Neo-Quineanism and the method of metaphysics
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…
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Anti-realism and the decline of truth
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…
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Locating value
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…
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The books (2021)
In 2019, I read 27 books. In 2020, I decided to challenge myself and read at least 50 books; which I managed to do, in fact reading as many as 63. But one thing I noticed was a perverse desire to read short books, since short books would get me to my goal faster. To…
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On knowledge and belief
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…
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Kantian and Cartesian scepticism
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…
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On the Unity of Kant’s Many Cognitive Powers
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…