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 ›
philosophy
LESS IS MORE
If you want to know whether you’ve been reporting or commenting, count your adjectives and adverbs. The most effective commentary comes across as reporting, because it lets the facts speak for themselves. If they can’t, and so they have to… Read More ›
THE MISSING SUBJECT ARGUMENT
Let me repeat, for the 108th time, that I’m not pro-Life. As I‘ve labored to make clear, I’m anti-Life. I want a world consisting of nothing but inanimate objects. But I have to admit that pro-Lifers have at least one… Read More ›
INTER-GENERATIONAL JUSTICE
Dr. Doolittle can talk with all the animals. I can only talk with my dog. Still, I can testify – because she’s assured me of this – that she doesn’t think of me as belonging to a different species. She… Read More ›
THE ADVANTAGES OF PRETENDING-TO-BELIEVE OVER BELIEVING
I find it amazing how many people in western Libya, who supported Gaddafi when it looked like he was going to able to hold Tripoli, will have having not supported him when it became clear that he wasn’t. (I also… Read More ›
THE RHETORICIAN AND THE PHILOSOPHER
A Janus word is one that means one thing but also its opposite. Example: sanction. There are word-pairs that sound like they mean the opposite but don’t, like flammable and inflammable. And then there are word-pairs that sound like they… Read More ›
AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING TRANSPHOBIC …
Apart from the half dozen things I do care about – and for aught I know I’m the only one who does – I pretty much live in my own little world. My wife, by contrast, researches everything. She even… Read More ›
WHAT IS IT TO TRIVIALIZE?
I killed a wasp the other day. I murdered a wasp the other day. These have two very different meanings. Why? Because killing means killing, whereas murder means wrongful killing, and presumably no one, or almost no one, thinks it’s… Read More ›
WHAT TO DO WHEN A COLLEAGUE GOES AWOL
What things need to be licensed, what can but needn’t be, and what shouldn’t be? Doctors, engineers, pilots, certainly. But some people have argued, though mostly tongue-in-cheek, that if anyone needs to be pre-qualified it’s parents. Requiring a license to… Read More ›
URGENCY
I have a colleague who’s become a little bored with teaching modus ponens and the Meditations, and instead now fancies himself something of an authority on global warming. The way you become an authority, by the way, is by so… Read More ›
