Myths and Traitors
Before offering some final words, I want to thank the editors for inviting me to share my thoughts this week about The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being. A quick recap of the week’s events:
Category: naturalism
The Normative and the Descriptive
The network theory explains well-being in purely descriptive terms. But well-being is normative. Tim’s well-being is intrinsically valuable for Tim. Can a purely descriptive theory of well-being account for normativity, for the value of well-being? I’m going to assume that the evidence of science and intuition strongly support the network …
SpaceTimeMind
You may (or may not) have noticed that Pete Mandik and Richard Brown (me) have started a podcast, called SpaceTimeMind, where we talk about tax law updates for 2014, uh, I mean, er, we talk about space and time and mind! The first episode is up now (and has been …
Symposium on Paul Churchland’s “Matter and Consciousness” (3rd ed., 2013)
I’m very glad to be able to kick off this symposium on Paul M. Churchland’s Matter and Consciousness, recently reissued in a new (third) edition by the MIT Press. Below the fold is a brief introduction to the symposium, followed by essays from our three contributors, Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna), William Ramsey (UNLV), …
2013 Spindel Conference: The Lives of Human Animals
The problem of personal identity is one of the most bewitching puzzles in all of philosophy. Until very recently, most philosophers subscribed to the view first advocated by the 17th-century British philosopher, John Locke. Locke held that our fundamental nature is given by our status as self-conscious, rational agents (“persons”) …
More on Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos”
The following analysis was submitted by Brains reader Bruce Mayo, a retired computational linguist with some background in philosophy, in response to Kristina’s much-discussed post. Enjoy! Now that some of the dust has settled around Thomas Nagel’s recent book, Mind and Cosmos, it might be time to sort out the …
Symposium on Louise Richardson’s “Flavour, Taste and Smell” (Mind & Language 28 (3), 322-341)
I’m very glad to be able to kick off the first of a series of symposia that Brains will be hosting on papers from Mind & Language. This month our target article is “Flavour, Taste and Smell”, by Louise Richardson of York University in the UK.