WHY THIS RATHER THAN THAT? As any mother of a small child can tell you, any answer to a why question invites a why to that, and then another to that one, and so on, until the child either declares… Read More ›
pure philosophy
FROM THE THINGS NOT TO THINK ABOUT FILE
When we say “It’s a little known fact that …”, we usually mean precisely that. But since I’m a philosopher rather than a polymath, I like to use the phrase to refer to something that if you think about it,… Read More ›
IT’S A LITTLE KNOWN FACT THAT …
When someone initiates a conversation with “It’s a little known fact that …”, what he typically means is that there’s something he knows, but his interlocutor probably does not. But I want to bring our attention to another use of… Read More ›
ONTOLOGY – EIGHTH INSTALMENT
VIII. DIMENSIONS, SHAPES, AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY We live in a three-dimensional world. Too quick. We conceive of our world as three-dimensional, but it doesn’t follow that it is. Though it may be – we’ll have to see – that for all… Read More ›
ONTOLOGY – SEVENTH INSTALMENT
VII. FINITISM – PART TWO The issue here is Zeno’s Paradox and how to resolve it. To get from here to there I first have to cover half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half the distance still… Read More ›
ONTOLOGY – SIXTH INSTALMENT
VI. FINITISM – PART ONE In his Third Meditation, Rene Descartes offered a unique version of Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument for the existence of God. It goes like this. Everything we experience we experience as not going on forever. Even if… Read More ›
ONTOLOGY – FIFTH INSTALMENT
V. OCCAM’S RAZOR AND ATOMISM The core axiom driving any cognitive system is to treat like alike. So naturally, whenever there’s such an option, the mind would prefer to think that things are, at some fundamental level, alike, so they… Read More ›
ONTOLOGY – FOURTH INSTALMENT
IV. IN PRINCIPLE VERSUS EPISTEMIC So we’ve decided that ‘being’ is itself an unanalysable primitive, but an enabler concept nonetheless. And we’ve decided that by kind of being we mean a closed set of causal relations. So there can really… Read More ›
ONTOLOGY – third instalment
III. ARE THERE KINDS OF BEING? As we’ve just seen, ontology full stop can’t be about being full stop. But it could be about what kinds of being there are. That horse over there is one kind of being. Pegasus… Read More ›
ONTOLOGY (continued)
II. BEING By ontology-full-stop is meant the study of being. Well that’s not very helpful, now is it? So try this. Of the things that are, as distinct from those that aren’t, what exactly are the former busy doing that… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 