Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Graduate Conference on Essentialism
Saturday, September 13, 2008
First Obama, Now Palin - Smears All Around!
Monday, August 18, 2008
Why I Think John Piper's 'Christian Hedonism' View Sucks (And Also What's Good About It Too)
Friday, July 25, 2008
Quick Thoughts on Some Remarks by Dummett
The four-dimensional model [...] deprives the world we observe of genuine change; there is only that of our awareness as we travel into the future. The model is grounded on the conception of our consciousness as moving through the static four-dimensional reality along the temporal dimension.
A proponent of the four-dimensional model may deny this. We are, he says, irregular four-dimensional tubes (or hypertubes), with the peculiarity that consciousness attaches to our temporal cross-sections. Nothing changes: it is just that our different temporal cross-sections are aware of different things.
This image is misconceived. Consider a description of other hypertubes, whose axes lie along a spatial dimension. To us these would appear long, very short-lived objects; if we learned that a different consciousness attached to each segment of one of the tubes, we should regard them as strings of distinct creatures. But if we were told that a different consciousness attached to each cross-section of such a tube at an angle orthogonal to its axis, and that the different consciousnesses varied continuously, we could make nothing of this at all.
Another less than stellar paragraph comes a few pages later, where Dummett writes:
Why should truth be explained in terms of knowledge? The question is whether it is possible to swallow the conception of a reality existing in utter independence of its being apprehended. [...] My question is whether it is intelligible to suppose that the universe might have been devoid of sentient creatures throughout its existence. What would be the difference between the existence of such a universe and there being no universe at all? To express the question theologically, could God have created a universe devoid of sentient creatures throughout its existence? What would be the difference between God's creating such a universe and his merely conceiving of such a universe without bringing it into existence? What difference would its existence make? It seems to me that the existence of a universe from which sentience was perpetually absent is an unintelligible fantasy. What exists is what can be known to exist. What is true is what can be known to be true. Reality is the totality of what can be experienced by sentient creatures and what can be known by intelligent ones.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Metaphysical Thoughts I: Past Notes
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10/9/01
10/11/01
10/15/01
4/18/02
7/9/02
7/15/02
10/23/02
Monday, July 14, 2008
Moral Indexicals, Or Why Judgment Internalism Is Not Evidence Against Objectivist Moral Realism
First, I would contend that in fact not all moral judgments do motivate on their own. Consider this one: 'Ian Spencer ought to A'. That's not going to motivate me to do anything unless I know that I am Ian Spencer. Andy Egan thinks that since self-locating beliefs such as 'I' beliefs are motivating and hence that moral judgments must be self-locating beliefs ascribing to oneself the property of being such that one's ideal rational self would prescribe or proscribe such and such. But notice that, as we just saw, the only moral judgments that are in fact motivating are the ones that contain an explicit first-person reference. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is a moral judgment - it only has to do with the fact that it contains a first-person indexical! So Egan is right to find the motivating factor in a motivating moral judgment to come from self-location but he is wrong to think that this has anything to do with the relativity of morality. After all, an moral realist objectivist could perfectly well agree that self-location is doing the work here but disagree with Egan's relativism - the non-motivating third-person judgment and the motivating first-person one express the same facts and these can perfectly well be objective, morally realist facts. Similarly, 'Ian Spencer is being chased by a bear' and 'I am being chased by a bear' express the same objective, realist fact even though the latter will motivate me all on its own whereas the former will not (that requires me to know that I am Ian Spencer). Note that this also shows that there may also be non-moral judgments that are also intrinsically motivating insofar as I'm rational!
Second, suppose I am wrong about the above. Notice that Judgment Internalism says that it is only if one is rational (or insofar as one is so) that one is motivated by moral judgments. But if we view morality as in the business of dealing with reasons for action, we can view moral judgments as embodying or expressing reasons for or against different actions. Now, insofar as one is rational, one will be motivated by one's reasons. So judgment internalism follows nearly-trivially from just these two conceptual points about morality and its connection with rationality. No need for relativism or emotivism or what-have-you. The nature of rationality and morality jointly do all that work for us. So whichever of these two arguments you choose to employ, it looks like the move from Judgment Internalism to relativism or anti-realism done for.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Christ and Proper Functioning: Past Notes
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10/6/01
10/27/01
11/2/01
11/9/01
11/19/01
11/21/01
1/9/02
12/13/02
2/19/03