If Just One Thing is Not Socially Constructed
May 24, 2014
What is Objective Truth anyway? What is Reality? Anyone who has defended a remotely realist philosophy will no doubt have faced a familiar challenge: it’s all a social construction. Take money. That couldn’t exist without a society giving it meaning, imbuing it with value. And God is surely socially constructed rather than a real being …
Being Sensible
April 13, 2014
Some recent Arts Matters posts might have perpetuated the myth of the five bodily senses. Of course there are many more even if we restrict ourselves to human beings. And if we include animals, we find others besides. Bats make their way around using echolocation, as every philosopher knows because of Thomas Nagel’s paper ‘What …
Let’s Get Physical
August 31, 2013
Philosophers develop their mental lives as much as anyone does. And academics, especially in the arts, put thinking first. But that sometimes leads us to neglect our physical being. It is essential to us that we are an embodied rationality, with a physical location and extent in space and time, exercising our free agency. It …
Metaphysics and Better Physics
September 9, 2012
Last week I attended a workshop on Causation in Physics, part of a larger project called Causation in Science (CauSci for short). Among the speakers was the ever-eloquent and erudite Thor Sandmel whose talk raised the question of how physics relates to our experience of causation in the world. We have a philosophical theory of …
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