Blogging’s been light because I’ve been tied up for most of this month with several projects that are at crunch time. One of those projects is a substantial revision of my paper “A Defense of Prior’s ‘Peircean’ Tense Logic” that I presented at a conference in April 2006. As with most issues, I’ve found that… Read More »
An indexical is a pointing word, one used to refer directly to something. (To remember this, think of your index finger, the one you use to point with.) Examples include ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘we’, ‘they’, ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’, and ‘now’. Clearly, indexicals are an important part of our speech. In fact, nearly every… Read More »
Just a few quick, not fully thought-out ideas on this topic. Consider the present-tensed statement “It is now 3 o’clock”. How should we articulate truth conditions for this statement? The dominant view is that the truth conditions must take into account the de facto time of utterance. Thus, (1) “It is now 3 o’clock” uttered… Read More »
There are many lame arguments. I’m going to focus on two. One is an argument for theism. The other is often used an argument against theism. Both are guilty of the same mistake: A
Many theists who subscribe to divine immutability and timelessness follow Aquinas in holding that God is Pure Act. For Aquinas, this means not only that God is completely determinate and without any residual indeterminacy or “potency” but also that God is existence or “actuality” pure and simple (ipsum esse subsistens, actus purus, etc.), without any… Read More »
I don’t think so. Let me explain. To say that God freely creates is to say that he could have refrained from creating and that he could have created a different sort of world, one with different initial and boundary conditions. To say that God is timeless is to say that he undergoes no change… Read More »
Fourth, there must a social afterlife. Consider a conscious afterlife in which a person is completely isolated from anyone else, like being in eternal solitary confinement. Such a fate seems unimaginably horrible. If that were my destiny right now, then I’d say that my life has no meaning in the specified sense. But what if… Read More »
In my previous post, I concluded that when people ask about the meaning of life what they normally want to know is whether an individual person’s life can have an ultimate and objective meaning of a sort that could matter to that individual. In this post I want to consider what that meaning might consist… Read More »
To ask “What is the meaning of life?” presupposes an affirmative answer to the question “Does life have a meaning?” Asking that question, in turn, presupposes that one has some idea of what the phrase “the meaning of life” could mean. What would it mean for life to have a meaning, if it has one?… Read More »