Monday, July 28, 2008

Why Zombies Are Impossible (by guest blogger Teed Rockwell)

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Does it make sense to speak of creatures which behave exactly like conscious beings, but are not actually conscious? Such creatures are call...
22 comments:
Sunday, July 27, 2008

Yet One More Reason to Believe in Divine Dispassion...

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... from my eight-year-old son, Davy, an aspiring cartoonist! (Yes, that's an alien spaceship with a pincer grip on Earth.)
4 comments:
Friday, July 25, 2008

In Philosophy, Women Move More Slowly to Tenure Than Do Men

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It's well known (at least among feminist philosophers!) that only about 20% of philosophy professors are women. Surely this is partl...
16 comments:
Sunday, July 20, 2008

Why there is No Magic in the Harry Potter Books (by guest blogger Teed Rockwell)

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Philosophers and psychiatrists both use the word “magic" as a term of abuse. Intelligent Design Theory is accused of relying on magic. ...
16 comments:
Friday, July 18, 2008

Do Words Ever Feel Like They're Literally on the Tip of Your Tongue?

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In the course of writing my book with Russ Hurlburt , I started to notice what I took to be a pattern in our subject Melanie, and others, to...
22 comments:
Monday, July 14, 2008

How to Make a Rabbit’s Nose out of Electric Jello (by guest blogger Teed Rockwell)

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We’ve all seen patterns created by causal forces “pushing” against each other (whether that description is literal or metaphorical depends o...
4 comments:
Monday, July 07, 2008

Against Metaphysics, Especially the Metaphysics of Consciousness

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I worry that metaphysics is a sham -- or at least, that it's a sham if it's thought of as an a priori discipline whereby one discove...
49 comments:
Tuesday, June 24, 2008

What Is a Word, If a Baby Can Say It?

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When my son Davy (who's now eight) was about ten months old he'd cruise around holding onto the couch saying "da da da da"...
24 comments:
Thursday, June 19, 2008

The Psychology of Philosophy

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"Experimental philosophy", as a movement within philosophy, has so far been almost entirely focused on testing people's intuit...
8 comments:
Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote Less Often, Apparently, Than Other Philosophers

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I assume that voting in public elections is a duty (a duty that admits of excuses and exceptions, of course) and that it's morally bette...
19 comments:
Saturday, June 14, 2008

Political Scientists Vote More Often Than Other Professors

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One theme of my recent research has been the moral behavior of ethics professors -- do they behave any better than others of similar social...
8 comments:
Friday, June 13, 2008

Experimental Philosophy Survey

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Thomas Nadelhoffer has posted a new online survey, and he wants philosophical respondents. Link here . I shouldn't reveal the contents...
4 comments:
Monday, June 09, 2008

Political Affiliations of American Philosophers, Political Scientists, and Other Academics

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As regular readers will know, I've been working hard over the last year thinking of ways to get data on the moral behavior of ethics pro...
20 comments:
Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Self-Blindness?

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If introspection is essentially a matter of perceiving one's own mind, as philosophers like John Locke and David Armstrong have suggest...
25 comments:
Thursday, May 29, 2008

More Philosophy Ph.D. Admissions Data from U.C. Riverside

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[Due to objections by some members of the UCR department, this post has been removed.]
34 comments:
Monday, May 26, 2008

Will the Real Issue Please Stand Up? (by guest blogger Bryan Van Norden)

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One of the classic debates in ethics is between realism and anti-realism. It's hard to precisely state what is at issue without being t...
7 comments:
Thursday, May 22, 2008

The Unreliability of Naive Introspection...

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... that is, my essay of that title, is now out in Philosophical Review . I confess to some pride: The essay is the culmination of years of...
9 comments:
Monday, May 19, 2008

What Sorts of People Should There Be?

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A fascinating question. A reflexive rejection of eugenics is too simplistic . There are so many ways now open (or opening) to shape oursel...

Defining "Consciousness"

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Scientists, students, ordinary folks, and even philosophers sometimes find the word "consciousness" baffling or suspicious. Unders...
32 comments:
Thursday, May 15, 2008

The Hermeneutic Alternative (by guest blogger Bryan Van Norden)

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Philosophy begins in wonder. -- Aristotle Aristotle was wrong. Philosophy begins when a community of people encounter a problem that outst...
17 comments:
Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Philosophers' Spouses

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Between the new daughter and two and a half weeks (so far) of raging sinusitis, it's been hard for me to keep up with the blog. Thankf...
8 comments:
Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Philosophers Don't Get No Respect (by guest blogger Bryan Van Norden)

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(This is the second in a series of guest blog entries by Bryan .) Eric wrote an interesting entry two months ago in which he noted how much...
33 comments:
Saturday, May 03, 2008

Crossing Cultures in Free Will (by Guest Blogger Hagop Sarkissian)

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Academic philosophers are a fairly homogeneous bunch--mostly male, mostly white. So, when a philosopher proposes a thought experiment and th...
21 comments:
Thursday, May 01, 2008

Unsolicited Advice to Students and Their Advisors (by guest blogger Bryan Van Norden)

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This blog entry is by Bryan Van Norden , Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Department of Chinese and Japanese at Vassar College...
44 comments:
Monday, April 28, 2008

Does Studying Economics Make You Selfish?

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There's been a lot of discussion in economics circles about how economics training makes people more selfish -- in particular, by teachi...
9 comments:
Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Qi (Ch'i) and Moral Psychology

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The term qi (or ch'i) is known to Westerners mainly through martial arts and new age mumbo-jumbo, and is taken to mean something like s...
10 comments:
Friday, April 18, 2008

"Mama" as an Early Expression of Need?

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When we first met Kate, our adoptive Chinese daughter, at 13 months old, she was already babbling, saying "mama(-m)" and "bab...
12 comments:
Friday, April 11, 2008

Tucson Presentation

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On the Underblog I've posted the text of the talk I gave this morning for the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference. Given tha...
18 comments:
Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Experiential Blanks

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I'm on the road, at the biennial consciousness conference in Tucson. Yesterday, Russ Hurlburt and I led a workshop on the use of beep...
11 comments:
Wednesday, April 02, 2008

First Draft to Publication, Fifteen Years

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I had hoped to be back to regular posting by now, a week and a half after my return from China, but things are still pretty chaotic! I poste...
9 comments: