I’m rather attracted to presentism, the view that the present is coextensive with the real. The past is no more; the future is not yet; whatever exists simpliciter exists now. Presentism is one of several views that affirms an A-theory of time (roughly, the A-theory says that temporal becoming is real, and not merely apparent).… Read More »

Picking up where I left off in my last post … On Thursday evening I sat through an interesting exchange between two process theists (Donald Viney and Randall Auxier), an open theist (David Basinger), and C. Steven Evans, well-known Kierkegaard scholar (I’m not sure where Evans stands vis-a-vis open theism. He’s definitely not a theological… Read More »

Well, it’s Friday morning here in Portland, Oregon, where this year’s Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association is being held. On Thursday morning, I went to an interesting session on the philosophy of time. The first paper, by well-known B-theorist Nathan Oaklander, was entitled “Is the Future Open?” As one would expect for… Read More »

I’ve been doing some thinking of late about the nature of love. I’ve already posted some preliminary thoughts about what ideal or perfect love would look like here. In this post I’d like to approach the topic from a different angle, by contrasting love with three of its ‘opposites’, namely, hate, fear, and indifference. In… Read More »

My last two posts have been on the topic of the nature and relations of propositions (“props”) and states of affairs (“sofas”), respectively. I’ve been lingering on the topic for two reasons. One is that I’ve recently become aware of a challenge by Richard Fumerton to my working theory on the topic. Another is that… Read More »

I’m blogging again on this issue of the relation between propositions (“props”) and states of affairs (“sofas”) because I’m not quite sure I’m got a firm handle on things yet. My understanding of these matters is still somewhat shifting and uncertain. So let’s take a fresh look at things from a different angle. Consider a… Read More »

I like blogging because it gives me a medium to “test drive” ideas and arguments. One topic that I’ve been mulling over of late has been the relation between propositions (“props”) and states of affairs (“sofas”). My working theory over the past couple years has looked something like this: Props are assertoric units of meaning… Read More »

Well, my wife and I are back in Vegas after a six-day California road trip. Here are some of the highlights: We started out by driving down to the LA area, where we stayed with an old friend from my New York days who now manages a neuroscience lab at UC Irvine. The next day… Read More »

From K. Vossler, Positivismus und Idealisms in der Sprachwissenschaft (1904). Quoted by Polanyi in Personal Knowledge (p. 102): The true artists of speech remain always conscious of the metaphorical character of language. They go on correcting and supplementing one metaphor by another, allowing their words to contradict each other and attending only to the unity… Read More »

Michael Polanyi’s 1958 book Personal Knowledge gets my vote for most important neglected philosophical masterpiece of the 20th century. It’s a wonderful book by a chemist- turned-philosopher of science that is in many ways far more profound than the much more influential work of Karl Popper. I first read Polanyi’s book about 10 years ago… Read More »