The Splintered Mind

Our own moral character is largely unknown to us. Lots of jerks think they're just swell. Lots of saints and sweethearts suffer from...

Might there be excellent reasons to embrace radical skepticism, of which we are entirely unaware? You know brain-in-a-vat skepticism --...

Eric Kaplan , who overlapped with me in grad school at Berkeley but who is now much more famous as a comedy writer for Big Bang Theory , Fut...

One of the most prominent theories of consciousness is Guilio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory . The theory is elegant and intere...

I'm in Florida with glitchy internet and a 102-degree fever, so now seems like a good day to fall back on the old blogger's privileg...

A couple of months ago, I had some great fun chatting with Richard Brown and Pete Mandik at SpaceTimeMind . Pete has now edited our convers...

Oh, when the saints go marching in Oh, when the saints go marching in Lord, I want to be in that number When the saints go marching in. ...

Every year's end at UC Riverside, the philosophy faculty meet for three hours "to discuss the graduate students". Back in the...

The Philosophers' Carnival , as you probably know, posts links to selected posts from around the blogosphere, chosen and hosted by a dif...

There isn't a lot of philosophical (or even psychological) work on schadenfreude -- the pleasure people sometimes feel at witnessing or ...

My theory of the jerk is out in Aeon . From the intro: Picture the world through the eyes of the jerk. The line of people in the post of...

It might help convince the audience of my seriousness if I wear it at my next public lecture. Order here .

The stats aren't totally straightforward, since I switched counters a few years ago, but it looks like The Splintered Mind has had more ...

Here . A sample: Personally, I give Giulio enormous credit for having the intellectual courage to follow his theory wherever it leads. Wh...

Must an infinitely continued life inevitably become boring? Bernard William famously answers yes ; John Fischer no . Fischer's case i...

Ergo , a new online philosophy journal, has just released its first issue . Open access, triple anonymous, fast turnaround times (hopefully...

Why should a philosopher care about the nature of belief? Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a student, there were two main animating ...

I've been thinking recently about group organisms and group minds . And I've been thinking, too, about the Fermi Paradox -- about...

My latest in crazy, dijunctive metaphysics: Abstract: A 1% skeptic is someone who has about a 99% credence in non-skeptical realism and ab...

When I was in Berlin in 2010, I spent some time in the Humboldt University library, looking through philosophy journals from the Nazi era, i...

I'm at the biennial Tuscon conference Toward a Science of Consciousness , so wild speculation about consciousness is the order of the da...

Weird Tales , one of the best and oldest horror and dark fantasy magazines, has just launched a new series of ultra-short flash fiction (und...

I think the most recent meta-analysis of the relationship between religosity and crime is still Baier and Wright 2001 . I'm reviewing i...