This is my first ‘real’ blog post, and before I begin, I’d like to thank John for inviting me to contribute to this blog (and apologize for the fact that it’s taken me while to get around to doing so). Many thanks for giving me this opportunity! I have recently …
Just a quick note that I recently published an article in The Philosophical Forum , “A New Theory of Free Will“, that may be of interest to readers (a free PDF of the penultimate draft is available here). Here’s the abstract: This paper shows that several live philosophical and scientific hypotheses – including …
The mind-body problem asks: How are mental states related to physical states of the brain, the body, and behavioral states more generally? Functionalists claim that mental states are identical with functional roles, defined as relations between environmental impingements, external behaviors, and other mental states.Analytic functionalists contend that these identities are imposed …
Via Brian Leiter, this post by Paul Thagard criticizes what he claims are eleven “dogmas” of “analytic philosophy”, which he describes as the attempt “to use the study of language and logic to analyze concepts that are important for the study of knowledge (epistemology), reality (metaphysics), and morality (ethics)”. Against …
I’d be interested in hearing what our readers think of Timothy Williamson’s case against naturalism in this post at the NYT’s Stone blog (H/T NewApps). As I read it, his argument has the form of a dilemma. There are, he supposes, two ways that the thesis of naturalism can be …
By Manolo Martinez [UPDATE] I have posted a quick summary of the imperative content strategy in dealing with affective phenomenology here. Hello everyone. This is my first post for Brains! So, yep: great to be here, etc. A quick caveat: I’m afraid this post makes a tl;dr response perfectly appropriate. …
Jerry Fodor, LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited. Oxford, OUP, 2008. Some quick observations on Fodor’s new book: 1. As usual, a great book: ambitious, provocative, full of ideas and arguments, and as a bonus, funny (for those who like his humor). 2. He is still a computationalist, language-of-thought …
