(i) Judith Butler’s Peculiar Prose Style (ii) Reading and Listening to Music at the Same Time (iii) Reading Kant Seriously (iv) What Is a “Pseudo-Intellectual”? Judith Butler’s Peculiar Prose Style This is a serious question: Why does Judith Butler write in a very peculiar way? The English philosopher Julian Baggini once argued that Jacques Derrida’s philosophy was somehow embedded in his “complex and difficult” prose style. This doesn’t mean that Derrida’s philosophy couldn’t help but be written in complex and difficult prose simply because the philosophy itself is difficult a ..read more

  (i) Introduction (ii) Paul Churchland on Qualia (iii) Colin McGinn and David Chalmers on Qualia (iv) Aaron Sloman on Qualia (v) Are Qualia Ineffable, Private, and Yet Causally Salient? (vi) Dennett on Verbal Reports About Qualia See my ‘Margaret Boden on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Consciousness’ for a short introduction to both Margaret Boden herself, and her book AI: Its Nature and Future. When it comes to qualia and artificial intelligence (AI), Boden discusses the ideas and theories of Paul Churchland and Aaron Sloman. So let’s firstly deal with the Canadian philosopher P ..read more

  (i) Should We Trust Physicists? (ii) Analytic Philosophy Is… (iii) Carlos Fernandes Shouts About Sam Harris and Free Will (iv) The infinite… what!? (v) Marijuana and Alcohol… Should We Trust Physicists? There’s an element of truth to the meme above. Personally, I feel like I’m encroaching on sacred territory when I comment on physics — especially on string theory. Put simply, I don’t know the maths. Thus, I must rely on what philosophers call testimony… Not that any single testimony — even large scale — could ever be decisive when its comes to a layperson accepting a scientific idea ..read more

  (i) Does Theory Rule OK in the Philosophy of Mind? (ii) “Everything is Mathematical.” So what! (iii) The Essays I Should Have Written (iv) Which Philosophers Must We Read? (v) I Feel Free! (vi) Is the Ethical Mystifying? Does Theory Rule OK in the Philosophy of Mind? There may be some truth to what David Bentley Hart says about what he calls “modern philosophy of mind”. However, it entirely depends on examples and specifics. In this quote at least , there aren’t any. Philosophers of mind have actually adopted almost every position under the sun on the nature of the mind ..read more

Schrödinger’s cat is a reductio ad absurdum. So too is Wigner’s friend. Both are related examples of thought experiments which were (as it were) designed to show how and why a particular position (or theory) is absurd. (i) Schrödinger on the Collapse of the Wavefunction (ii) Schrödinger’s Many Worlds? (iii) Schrödinger’s Scientific Realism? (iv) Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds, and Wigner’s Friend (v) Some Technical Details (vi) Carlo Rovelli on Wigner’s Friend (vii) Michio Kaku on Observers vs Cameras Schrödinger on the Collapse of the Wavefunction The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (188 ..read more

 (i) Has the World Stopped Having Sex? (ii) Can Any Philosophical Question Be Answered With Certainty? (iii) Panpsychism: Mysticism, Anti-Science… and Politics (iv) Scientific Experts and Academics as a Priest Class (v) Bigging-Up Peer-Reviewers (or Referees) (vi) Scientists, Not Just Politicians & Activists, Abuse Science (vii) Is There Too Much Analytic Philosophy? Has the World Stopped Having Sex? You can guarantee that the central claim of this Telegraph article is false. You can also guarantee that it doesn’t even deliver what its sexy title suggests. And I’m not being pe ..read more

 (i) Introduction (ii) Two Cases: Immanuel Kant and Philip Goff (iii) Too Much Context? (iv) The Objectivity of a Free Market Think Tank (v) Abortion and the Nazis Again! (vi) The Nazis Believed Things Which Are True Did this book go too far in the direction of (1)?Opening note: The word “context” will be used in this essay a fair few times. It’s a catchall term for capturing the circumstances, social/psychological backgrounds, historical/social surroundings, etc. which (as it were) give birth to the ideas and beliefs of philosophers and scientists. However, what follows isn’t goin ..read more

 (i) Psychedelic Heaven: Psychedelic Hell  (ii) Roger Penrose  (iii) Peer-Review My Tweets!  (iv) “Does God Exist?” “Shut up!”  (v) Reductionism!  (vi) Is Panpsychism an Affront to Science?  (vii) Memorising Poems  (viii) Epistemology Is… Rather than reposting stuff, see the original introduction to my series of reposts from X here. Psychedelic Heaven: Psychedelic Hell People seem to be divided into two extremes on this subject: (1) Those who believe that if everyone started taking psychedelics, then a universal Utopia would follow within a week or ..read more

 (i) Bernardo Kastrup: The YouTube Cult Leader  (ii) Multiple Philosophy Memes on Twitter/X  (iii) Is Analytic Philosophy Isolated From Other Disciplines?  (iv) Stop Getting Nietzsche Wrong!  (v) The Prose Style of Academics  (vi) The Context of Discovery and Context of Justification  (vii) Do You Hate Academics? Rather than reposting stuff, see the original introduction here. Bernardo Kastrup: The YouTube Cult Leader The idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup has done dozens — perhaps over a hundred — of interviews on YouTube. Almost all those people ..read more

  (i) Introduction (ii) The Grammar of the Word “Nothing” (iii) The History of Nothing (iv) Parmenides on Nothing (v) Russell and Quine on Nothing (vi) Martin Heidegger on Nothing (vii) Graham Priest on Nothing Opening Note As will be seen throughout this essay, the word “nothing” has, at time, been capitalised in a Heideggerian (or Platonic) manner. Why? The statement It’s the case that really nothing is important. when expressed as, say, psychological and personal advice, is different to the statement It’s the case that nothing is important. when expressed as a statement about ontol ..read more