Perfection
February 16, 2014
Knowing when to stop is one of the most difficult decisions of the creative process. It is not always easy to judge when a work is finished. Perhaps a painting needs one or two more brush strokes in a few places, a poem could do with an extra word added and a couple of them …
An Unknowable Truth
February 1, 2014
We have to be humble sometimes and admit we are not capable of knowing everything that is true. This should be uncontroversial for surely there are many truths about the past all evidence of which is now erased. It is either true or false that a dinosaur sneezed on this exact spot 100 million years …
What Science Cannot Teach Us
January 17, 2014
If I had a hammer, there’s lots I could do with it. I could crush a walnut, for one thing. But I might hang a picture on the wall, knock a bulge out of my car’s wheel arch, break some toffee, start a carpentry project. I could also use it to bash someone’s brains in. …
Fictional Worlds
November 24, 2013
If you watch any Doctor Who episode from the classic series, you might well wonder what all the fuss is about. Some were better than others but there are undoubted moments of mediocrity to be found. Occasionally it was downright awful. Yet the series celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend and has been lauded throughout …
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 …
Soft or Hard?
January 20, 2013
We sometimes speak of the hard sciences, meaning physics, chemistry, mathematics and anything for which there are clear, determinate answers to be found. The hard/soft distinction can be found even in the arts. In philosophy we often distinguish between the hard end, of logic, metaphysics and epistemology, and the softer end of ethics, aesthetics and …
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 …
Social media
