Philosophy, et cetera

Kit Fine gave an interesting talk last Friday on globalism about vagueness, i.e. the claim that indeterminacy occurs in the first place ove...

Brandon recently linked his old post on the Propositional Depth Response to the Liar Paradox : Every meaningful statement must be assumed to...

Stephen Yablo gave a very impressive series of lectures here last week. His core insight was that often we can communicate important truths ...

Good reasoning is invaluable; it's what philosophy is all about. But I'm more skeptical of formal logic's value. Logic is a powe...

I think my favourite ever blog discussion would have to be the exchange I had with Jamie Dreier a couple of years back, over the following ...

Alex's comment to my previous post reminded me that I need to say a bit more about my treatment of indeterminacy. He wonders how the fo...

Granting the law of non-contradiction , do we necessarily have reason to avoid holding inconsistent beliefs (as such)? If so, then our pre...

Over at Ethics Etc , S. Matthew Liao presents Ruth Chang's argument for a fourth relation of comparative value - 'on a par' - t...

Two people independently pick a dollar value between 2-100. If they pick the same number, then both are paid this amount. Otherwise, the low...

Steve Esser drops an interesting comment at FQI : If the actual universe is infinite, wouldn’t it contain all possibilities? Not necessaril...

Here's a fun puzzle from the same guys that introduced me to the infinite spheres of utility problem. This one's more along the lin...

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

David Armstrong argues that there cannot be a set of all possible worlds: Given a world with n wholly distinct elements, we can combine the ...

Imagine a universe containing infinitely many immortal people, partitioned into two "spheres". In one sphere, all the inhabitants ...

Long-time readers may recall my interest in converting belief/truth-based paradoxes into desire/value analogues. So I found it very interes...

You shouldn't believe contradictions. For any given proposition, you should disbelieve either it or its negation. This claim is ambiguou...

I've written before about why rationality can't be too subjective. But here's another reason: it leads to contradiction. Consi...

Common sense would have us believe that you cannot travel an infinite distance in a finite amount of time. But do we actually have any good ...

[By Charles Johnson] Here's one of the few canonical philosophical puzzles that I had learned about by the age of five. What's the t...

The conference is going well, but for now I just have time now to write up a few quick thoughts on one of yesterday's talks. Lauren Ashw...