Andrew Cullison

I’m off to the Pacific APA in a couple of days. The following week is our spring break. I assume that I’ll have decent internet access while in California, so posting should continue. I’m commenting on a good paper on causation by Jonathan Matheson. Here’s the abstract (pulled from the Pacific APA website). Fragile Events [...]

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This is a very interesting article in Seed Magazine that should definitely be of interest to LEMMings and anyone interested in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. They’re trying to build a model of the brain from the bottom up. Each neuron in the model is an IBM microchip. It’s pretty fascinating stuff, and it may [...]

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I’ve been writing about Weak Substantivalism. Here are the two previous posts. 1. Two Kinds of Substantivalism2. They Are There: Some Consequences for Weak Substantivalism In the second post, I promised to post about some more counter-intuitive consequences of weak substantivalism. Here they are. More Counter-Intuitive Consequences for Weak SubstantivalismSuppose we have an Andy-shaped bag [...]

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A few days ago I laid out three views about the nature of space-time. Here’s a quick summary of those views. For those of you who read the last post, you can probably skip down to the section titled “They are There” Relationalism - Space is not real. Talk about space is reducible to talk [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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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 [...]

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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. [...]

Filed under: epistemology, metaphysics by Andrew Cullison
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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 [...]

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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 [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy by Andrew Cullison
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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 [...]

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One version of nominalism holds that properties just are sets of things. There is no abstract universal red-ness. There just is a set of red things. The problem is that ordinary sentences of English look like they are talking about something that could only be something like a universal. There is no talk of sets. [...]

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