No one can accuse me of being fair. But were I to be, then yes, every discipline has its own vocabulary, its own syntax, its own rules of inference … Words, phrases, sentences, they all take their meaning from the… Read More ›
Kant
THE TRUE MEANING OF LIFE
In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It’s a stupid question only in the sense that the answer is so self-evident. Of all the nigh-infinite worlds that could be, there’s only one… Read More ›
HOW THE ‘LIKE-ALIKE’ AXIOM REALLY PLAYS OUT IN MORAL AND POLITICAL JUDGMENT
Abstract This paper reads like – because it is – a meditation. Its ‘moments’ are these: That like cases are to be treated alike seems to be the core axiom behind all our moral and political reasoning. And yet this… Read More ›
WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IS WRONG WITH GENOCIDE?
— for presentation on October 7, 2009, and again on October 4, 2012, for the Liberal Education Capstone course on genocide —
IN PRAISE OF COLONIALISM
There’s a German film called Run Lola Run, which explores the radically different ways things would have gone if some seemingly inconsequential happenstance had been nigh-indiscernibly different. And there’s an American Christmas classic called It’s a Wonderful Life, in which… Read More ›
CHARLES DARWIN AND DAVID LEWIS
I’m not sure we needed Charles Darwin to alert us to this tautology: Things that persist over time do and things that don’t don’t. I’m not sure this explains anything, but yes, a Monarch butterfly keeps its markings over the… Read More ›
OH BUT THAT’S DIFFERENT
As a philosopher of mind Kant was beyond brilliant. As an ethicist he was an idiot. Kant asks us to consider two scenarios: I steal your wallet, you steal mine. If I think the one is okay, I have to… Read More ›
WHAT DO REVENGE FANTASIES TELL US ABOUT ETHICS?
I am not going to claim that all of us play host to revenge fantasies, because then I couldn’t deny – which I categorically do – that I certainly do. So everything I say here is prefixed by an I-hear-tell,… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 