February 29, 2008 – 3:51 pm
Substantivalism is the view that space is a real entity. A lot of substantivalists believe that there are (at least) two fundamental kinds - there is space and there are the material objects that occupy space. These kinds of objects are distinct from each other and equally real
It’s easier to understand what Substantivalism is by [...]
February 28, 2008 – 7:57 pm
Finally! They’re doing a Terminator in the future when all the robot war stuff happens. I’ve wanted this movie ever since I saw the first one (way back when). Christian Bale is playing the adult John Conner.
I gained a new respect for the Terminator movies when I first discovered philosophy of time, read “Paradoxes of [...]
February 28, 2008 – 2:43 pm
In the last few hours, I’ve stumbled on quite a few cool bits of philosophy…
1. Mike Almeida has a pretty interesting post on Multiverse responses to a variety of versions of the Problem of Evil here.
2. Carrie Jenkins just suggested that we might be able to handle Kripkenstein Undetermination Worries in a (roughly) analogous way [...]
February 26, 2008 – 10:50 pm
(HT: Justin over at Show Me The Argument)
February 23, 2008 – 10:35 am
Ralph Wedgewood over at PEA Soup presents an interesting puzzle that David Velleman recently discussed at a conference.
Here is the puzzle…
Suppose that Karen, a 14-year old girl, decides to conceive a child. Having a child at such a young age will make life very hard for Karen, and for her child as well: in general, [...]
February 21, 2008 – 10:08 am
This is a pretty interesting article that was just posted on Slashdot. It summarizes some pretty cool findings that should be of interest to philosophers interested in issues related to epistemology and perception.
It turns out that there are many cases in which what people expect to see tricks them into thinking they saw it. [...]
February 20, 2008 – 11:01 am
A couple of months ago Adam Arico over at Aspring Lemming noted that the TV Show Numb3rs gave a quick and dirty presentation of Searle’s Chinese Room argument.
I decided to see if I could find the clip on YouTube - Here it is…
The clip cuts off short…but Adam says that the presentation fails to note [...]
February 20, 2008 – 10:20 am
I really want to find time to read Trenton Merrick’s new book Truth and Ontology. It looks really interesting.
There are a wide range of metaphysical theses that are rejected because they are alleged to be incompatible with any kind of truth maker principle (or Truth Supervenes on Being Principle). Presentism is example of one of [...]
February 20, 2008 – 8:33 am
Jonathan Ichikawa justed posted about the lengthy journal review process here.I feel his pain. Today (and, I kid you not, it really is today) a journal has had one of my papers for exactly one year.
February 18, 2008 – 9:45 pm
In a recent post, I led up to the problem sentence for Nominalism.
(3) Red resembles Orange more than Square-ness.
The task for nominalism is to find an acceptable paraphrase for (3). (3) seems true, so whatever the paraphrase we come up with - it better be true too. We left off with (3**) as our candidate [...]