I read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series a few years ago. I found it hilariously funny overall, but by the time I got all the way to the end of the so-called “5-volume trilogy” it had become quite clear to me that Adams’ worldview is fundamentally nihilistic. In other words, existence is… Read More »

Sage thoughts from the Maverick Philosopher: Jesse Ventura: “Religion is for the weak!” Religionist: “No it’s not!” Such knee-jerk opposition avails nothing. Ventura is in fact right. What Ventura doesn’t appreciate, however, is that we are all weak. The correct response to Jesse the Body is not one of diametrical opposition but one of ju-jitsu-like… Read More »

Anyone who reads much philosophy will encounter a lot of Latin phrases. Leaving formal and informal fallacies out of it, the following are some of the most common. I have translated for the uninitiated. a fortiori – all the more so; e.g., if you can refute a more general or more plausible version of a… Read More »

In yesterday’s post I gave some background on the Intelligent Design (ID) debate and noted that an increasingly popular move by the mainstream scientific establishment has been to stipulate that “science” requires methodological naturalism. In other words, the claim is that properly “scientific” explanations can only make reference to ‘natural’ laws and entities, the kinds… Read More »

In the wake of a recent Pennsylvania court case there has been a lot of discussion about the scientific status (or lack thereof) of “Intelligent Design” (ID), an intellectual movement initially spearheaded by the works of Phillip Johnson and then picked up by Michael Behe, William Dembski, and a growing chorus of scientists, philosophers, and… Read More »

On a tip from hammsbear, I took a look at Peter Ludlow’s article, “Do T-Theories Display Senses”. Here are some of my thoughts on that article. Tarksi’s T-schema (“p” is true iff p) is often used to spell out the truth conditions for sentences. Thus, “snow is white” is true iff snow is white. (‘iff’… Read More »

I’m still reading Smith’s book (Language and Time), and I’ve noticed that Smith, along with everyone he’s critiqued thus far, makes an assumption about the truth conditions of sentence tokens that, frankly, seems false to me. First, let me explain what a sentence token is. Consider the sentence “It is raining” uttered on two separate… Read More »

Some of these are fairly lame, I admit. And some are clever but opaque to the philosophically uninitiated. See if you can figure them out before I explain any of them. (I wouldn’t want to spoil a good joke with premature commentary.) Don’t put Descartes before the horse. One day Descartes walked into a pub… Read More »

I’m currently reading Quentin Smith’s book Language and Time, in chapter 1 of which he has a nice argument against a certain kind of skepticism (pp. 14-18). His argument runs as follows. Is it ever reasonable for you to believe something just because it seems true to you and, so far as you are aware,… Read More »

So far as I am aware, all philosophers agree that if it rains on a particular Tuesday then it will be the case every day thereafter that it rained on that particular Tuesday. If we let P stand for “it was the case that …”, F stand for “it will be the case that …”,… Read More »