Andrew Cullison

I have some half-baked puzzles for presentism, but before I lay those out - I have a quick warm-up exercise. How Long Is the Present? I assume that if presentism is true, then the answer is durationless. This seems like a fair assumption. However, I vaguely remember someone describing a version of presentism according to [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized, metaphysics, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
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Here’s a recent pop-science article from the LA Times. It’s an interview with physicist, Sean Carroll (Caltech). He discusses the possibility of multiverses and the hypothesis that our universe is an off-shoot of some other universe in the multiverse.

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
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Here’s an interesting article about a group of people, including one neuroscientist, who plan to cheat death by uploading an exact copy of their brain states to a computer. Of course this plan does assume some kind of psychological continuity theory of personal identity. I hope someone has seriously discussed The Duplication/Fission Problem with them.

Filed under: fun, metaphysics by Andrew Cullison
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Net-neutrality debates and the issue regarding re-instating a metered internet are starting to get more MSM attention. Here’s a recent New York Times article that came out yesterday. And here’s a related, interesting column that came out a year ago on pbs.org. It’s not about net-neutrality per se, but it is interestingly related. It argues [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized, epistemology, metaphysics by Andrew Cullison
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Dan Korman just posted a nice little discussion on Hawthorne’s objection to common sense ontology here. I don’t dispute anything Korman says, but this has inspired to test drive another response to this kind of argument that I’ve been kicking around for awhile. Here’s the quote from Hawthorne that Korman uses. “Barring a kind of [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized, metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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In one of Ted Sider’s recent papers, he’s got a nice section trying to explain why philosophers should care about the metaphysical possibility of time travel. Here’s a passage. Before expending too much energy on the topic, it is worth thinking a bit aboutits point. Beyond the (perfectly legitimate) desire to set the record straight, [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
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SUNY-Fredonia’s own, Neil Feit, has a book coming out this summer. OUP has a description - plus some nice blurbs from Andy Egan and John Perry on their website. I’m pasting all of that below. Description Philosophers typically suppose that the contents of our beliefs and other cognitive attitudes are propositions-things that might be true [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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At first I thought, “This can’t be real.” But I looked into it more, and found an article that sheds a bit more light on the video. The guy in the video is Ronald Mallett. He’s a professor at the University of Connecticut, and yes he intends to build a time machine. Here’s a link [...]

Filed under: fun, metaphysics by Andrew Cullison
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UPDATE: I just found recent RSS feeds for Mind and Australasian. The feeds on Ingenta are never current. Once I plugged those into the mashups, the returns for metaphysics papers went through the roof! For some reason, it takes a while for the tweaks to take effect in the widget. Stay tuned and you should [...]

Filed under: metaphysics by Andrew Cullison
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Alexander Pruss just posted an interesting argument against Presentism. Here is the thought experiment that gets the ball rolling. You and I are watching an exciting game of tennis. Our particular interest is drawn by Federer’s next serve which is at a match point. With eager anticipation I speculate about how the serve will go. [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
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