Philosophy, et cetera

I've previously suggested that naturalism can't account for substantive boundary disputes  (and I mean to turn that into a proper pa...

A few years back I noted that 2-D semantics  provides a straightforward refutation of synthetic metaethical naturalism (SEN):  SEN implies ...

There's an interesting new paper in Ethics , Moral Realism and Two-Dimensional Semantics by Tim Henning, which offers a lot of opportun...

I'm sympathetic to the old-fashioned idea that reflection on normative concepts suffices to see that metaethical reductionism is a non-s...

The notion of 'content' is a bit mysterious to me, but I gather it is meant to be what is represented by a sentence or thought -- s...

In 'Moral Realism' (1986), Railton suggests a form of ideal agent theory (of one's non-moral good) designed to avoid the conditi...

[The concluding summary of my honours thesis. Links to the earlier chapters are interspersed with the text...] It’s natural to expect that w...

Suppose that, homicidal maniac that you are, you confess to me: "I would kill all my enemies if I thought I could get away with it....

Can non-trivial thoughts involving demonstratives ('this' or 'that') be a priori? (By "non-trivial", I mean that t...

Jessica Owensby-Sandifer (not to be confused with the other Sandefur !) offers an interesting argument against Chalmers' two-dimensiona...

This Missouri post poses an interesting dilemma: Suppose there’s a perfect God. If so, then he wouldn’t create any subpar worlds. For examp...

Let '@' be the rigidifying ' actually ' operator. "P iff @P" is a classic example of an a priori contingency. We ...

I think I've come up with a simpler way to characterize Chalmers' two-dimensionalism . A core idea is modal rationalism : the conten...

The synthetic ethical naturalist holds that there is an a posteriori identity between various moral and natural properties, much like that ...

Too often, philosophers (including my past self) misunderstand Kripke as having shown that the space of metaphysically possible worlds does...

Words have meanings. But what does this involve? We can clarify matters by associating linguistic expressions with various "semantic va...

There are two ways we can conceive of other possible worlds. We can hold the actual world fixed and consider another world as counterfactual...

J.L. Dowell, in her Meaning, Reason, and Modality , raises an objection to Chalmers' 2-D semantics. Chalmers defines the apriority (henc...

There was some interesting discussion over at Think Tonk recently. Clayton was arguing that theists can't fault Evolutionary Naturalism...

Consider the term: "the actual world". It means, transparently enough, something along the lines of "that possible world whic...