63rd Philosophers’ Carnival’s a Laugh

Welcome to the 63rd Philosophers’ Carnival. The subject was Comedy and there are three sections: the first is about theories of comedy and philosophy, and second is a roundup of recently funny things with a philosophical bent. At the end I put submissions of non-comedic philosophical musings. Part 1: Comedic Theory Did you hear the one about the philosopher writing a book on humour? via Continental Philosophy Philosophy Through Humor on ‘Philosophy Talk’ radio program. […]

Intentionality is Dead

After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave–a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead: but given the way of men there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.–And we–we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. ~F. N. If want to study the mind, we believed that we needed to understand intentionality: Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, […]

Paradox Analysis

Apropos my earlier rant on people who think that paradoxes are meaningless, I figured I ought to take a stab at giving some meaning to paradox. To this end I reformulated a paradox in my terms. I suppose I should called it the Mirror Paradox, though ‘Looking-Glass Paradox’ seems more lyrical and has an historical nod. My apologies to whoever actually came up with this first, though I am sure I haven’t heard it before… […]

Are Paradoxes Meaningless?

Aaron Cotnoir has suggested that people think that paradoxes are meaningless.  I think they are lucky that they hadn’t suggested that to me unless they wanted to see me freak out. It was my good fortune to have my first real exposure to the work of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein be from Thomas Ricketts.  I can’t remember verbatim what he said, but this is close: No one knows how long it took Frege to understand […]

Philosophers’ Carnival: Call for Submissions

I’m pleased to announce that this blog will be hosting the 63rd Philosophers’ Carnival. Submissions can be made by clicking on this link. Though I’ve written better papers, one of the few I think about regularly has to do with a philosophical theory of comedy. Since I believe we could all use a laugh, funny posts and posts having to do with comedy will take precedence. Still, if you know of a post that is […]

On The Scientific View of the World

Many people have a “scientific” view of the world. This means that the world operates according to the laws of science, i.e., there are no mysterious forces that cannot be explained by some combination of physics, biology, psychology, economics etc. It is a mistaken view. The scientific view of the world can be summarized by this formulation: S) The world is governed by science if and only if, given a specified way things are at […]

Consciousness Dilemma

I watched Dan Dennett’s Ted Talk “Can We Know Our Own Minds” yesterday and it reminded me of a problem I had with the study of consciousness. I am convinced a solution cannot be written down or said. Assume someone knows what consciousness/mind/divine spark/what-you-will is. If someone knows something, then it is part of their consciousness. If someone knows what consciousness is, then the consciousness has a part that contains consciousness. Therefore someone has a […]

Positive and Negative Biological Time

In my biorelativity series I used mutations per generation as a measurement of distance. However, with my recent historical/generative musings, specifically the post on the logical foundations of biorelativity (the logic of which is at the foundation of how I arrived at biorelativity), I fear I may have ignored the distinction between a mutation and an adaptation. Consider an organism with some feature. The feature can be considered both a mutation or an adaptation depending […]

The Logic of Biological Relativity [draft]

How can we represent biological relativity in logical notation? Organism a is adapting relative to organism b Aab Organism b is adapting relative to a Aba Organisms a and b are adapting relative to each other Aab & Aba This schema is unsatisfactory because it describes the situation from an indeterminate outside perspective: a and b are said to be adapting relative to each other without regard to the observer describing the situation. Relativity applies […]