The Splintered Mind

Part I: Should You Apply, and Where? Part II: Grades and Classes Good grades alone won't secure admission to a Ph.D. program in philosop...

My eight-year-old son Davy has been exploring bad words. Fortunately, he thinks the "S-word" is "stupid" and the "...

(Part I is here .) It's awfully hard to be admitted to top Ph.D. programs in philosophy, as I mentioned in Part I. Today: What do admis...

When I walk across campus, even across ridges and mudpuddles of the sort that frustrate robot designers, I unconsciously adjust my gait and ...

Last January I posted some thoughts on applying to graduate school in philosophy . Many people seem to have found that post helpful, and no...

here .

The situationist critique of virtue ethics runs as follows. Recent social psychology has shown that the factors governing human behavior ar...

I'm off to Oxford tomorrow for the annual meeting of the Consciousness & Experiential Society Section of the British Psychological ...

In two previous posts , I described the visual experiences reported by two volunteers who wore random beepers while keeping their eyes clos...

In 1810, Goethe , in the first book primarily on the subjective phenomena of vision, described "subjective halos" or successive ri...

I've recently been reading reviews and meta-analyses of some of the (in my judgment) weaker subareas of psychology: the relation between...

Whew! I've been chugging away so hard at a draft of my "Eyes Closed" essay that I've barely come up for air the last two ...

Okay, I confess, I'm obsessed. I've been trying to acquaint myself with the whole history of phenomenological reports of visual exp...

What, if anything, do you visually experience when your eyes are closed? Historical reports are diverse (some of the most detailed are Purk...

Today I share a long quote from Hermann von Helmholtz's Treatise on Physiological Optics . Helmholtz was one of the great intellectual...

In 2002, I published an article critical of the generally weak-to-nonexistent relationships between self-reported vividness of imagery and ...

You can will changes in your sensory visual experience indirectly, of course, by deliberately looking one direction, or closing your eyes, o...

... I've just learned. Maybe it's because of my dim view of Laozi ? Someone over there must have a lot of time on his hands, if he...

My friend Doug King advises us How Not to Pack a Suitcase .

Over the last year, I've been thinking a bit about visual experience with our eyes closed (e.g., here , here , here , here ). A few mon...

Before about 1950 or so, it seems, academic giants straddled whole fields. They were few and far between. Now, it seems, there are no Grea...

I've put up a new essay on my homepage: Do Ethicists Steal More Books? This essay presents more formally and in more detail the data d...