The Splintered Mind

Laozi (Lao Tzu) and Kongzi (Confucius) are the best-known and most admired ancient Chinese philosophers. Yet -- with apologies to Laozi ent...

Most philosophers, I suspect, doubt that blogs are a good medium for philosophy. Even Brian Leiter -- the blogosphere a bit too ephemeral,...

John Searle endorses "external realism", the view that there exists a mind-independent reality, in spite of the fact that our acce...

There are two ways of being unreliable. Something, or someone, might be unreliable because it often goes wrong or yields the wrong result, ...

In an earlier post , Eric asked the question, "Is There an Experience of Thinking?". In this post I would like to look at a relate...

When I was a graduate student, a girlfriend asked me what, of all things, I most enjoyed doing. Eschewing the obvious and half-clever reply...

It is worth drawing attention to the flexibility of the subordinating conjunction, "because". I can think of at least three import...

Readers familiar with my research will know that I'm pretty pessimistic about the reliability of introspection, even of currently ongoi...

is here .

(by guest blogger Joshua Rust) It is not uncommon to find philosophers defining otherwise problematic entities in terms of their causes. A p...

"Pinch me, I must be dreaming!" What assumption about dreaming lies behind this saying? I see two main candidates: (1.) If I'...

I have been recently listing to a series of lectures on the psychology of human emotion, distributed as a podcast from the UC Berkeley websi...

Regular visitors will know I post quite a bit on what I call The Problem of the Ethics Professors -- the fact (if it is a fact) that ethici...

If you've been reading much psychology recently, you've probably heard about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 's concept of " Flow ...

I can't recall ever having had the inclination to call a bit of philosophy "profound". I've been wondering recently what...

Little is known about the ancient Chinese philosopher Huizi (or Hui Tzu, c. 300 BCE), but some of his paradoxes survive in the remoter chapt...

here .

This article suggests so. From the abstract: This article examines associations between self-reported religious affiliations and official ...

Kant concludes Chapter One of the Groundwork suggesting that the value of formal moral philosophy over "common" moral reasoning i...

I'm a philosopher. For some reason, this hasn't prevented me from running experiments when I've felt they could shine some ligh...

No, he doesn't harvest music! One must work at it, but do not aim at it directly. Let the heart not forget, but do not help it grow. D...

Astronomers know -- or seem to know -- the most remarkable things on the slenderest base of evidence. Largely on the basis of the spectral ...

here . (Thanks Justin and Garrett!)

Suppose I'm right and ethicists don't behave better than anyone else (see these posts ). Shall we accuse them of hypocrisy? Consid...

Wednesday I argued that you can probably echolocate considerably better than you think you can. Let me amplify on that idea. First, we not...