July 10-13, 2017 University of Cologne, Germany Conference Abstract: Philosophizing about memory is as old as philosophy itself. Despite the long tradition of inquiry, the philosophy of memory was until recently not recognized as an area of research in its own right. In recent years, however, the situation has changed …
In my 2016 book, Rightness as Fairness: A Moral and Political Theory, I argue that morality is a solution to a problem of diachronic rationality called ‘the problem of possible future selves.’ To simplify (very) greatly, the problem–which is partially inspired by L.A. Paul’s groundbreaking work on transformative experience–is that (A) our present …
The extent and interest of third-personal self-knowledge notwithstanding, first-personal self-knowledge too deserves attention. In The Varieties of Self-Knowledge three chapters are devoted to a critique of contemporary accounts of it. In particular, I consider Armstrong’s reliabilist model, Peacocke’s and Burge’s different kinds of rationalism, Evans’s transparency method and its two …
Despite their differences, all previously reviewed accounts have something in common. That is, they adhere to monism with respect to self-knowledge. What they all do is focus on one specific instance, provide what seems at least a prima facie suitable explanation and then try to generalize it to all other …
“Know thyself” is the dictum which appeared on the front of the temple in Delphi. But what does that mean and why is it important? Presumably, it means to know, first and foremost, one’s own character and it is important because only by knowing one’s character can one be aware …
Neutral monism has a fascinating history, from Mach and Chancey Wright (b. 1830 in Northampton MA, where I happen to live) through William James, the American New Realists, including E.B. Holt and Ralph Barton Perry, many of them very much Harvard figures, Bertrand Russell, from 1919 to 1927, to Moritz …
I really like so-called neutral theories of mind-body relations. The “neutral” here means that the theories do not try to extract mind from matter by tortuous logical means, nor do they try to dissolve matter into mind, as idealism does. Most philosophers think that Wittgenstein and Ryle were behaviorists, but …
