68th Philosophers’ Carnival

is here

Some Moral Truths are Analytic

So I have been real busy preparing for next weeks ethis conference at Felician College in New Jersey. I will post the virtual presentation later this week if anyone is interested. Part of the argument that I make is that moral truths are analytic. Below are some thoughts on a different argument to that effect. [...]

Determinism and Cheating

I have always said that, regardless of whether it is true or not, belief in determinism is immoral. Well here is some very interesting possible evidence that that is true…

Reduction, Identity, and Explanation

Suppose that, like me, one is inclined to believe that type-type identity theory is true. This will mean that the mental state type pain will be identical to some brain state. I have argued that we can class the brain into two kinds of state, brain states (synchronous neural firing in the same frequency) and [...]

This is Too Funny

Zombies: The Movie (HT: A Brood Comb)

Beating an Undead Horse

Ok, Ok, I know everyone has moved on from discussing the zombie argument, and I should be grading papers, but I just can’t resist… In an earlier post I suggested the idea of a non-physical, or reverse-zombie. A reverse-zombie is a creature who is identical to me in all non-physical ways and which lacks conscious [...]

Top 10 Posts of 2008

OK, so the year isn’t over yet…but these are the most view posts so far… –Runner up– Reverse Zombies, Dualism, and Reduction 10. Question Begging Thought Experiments 9. Ontological Arguments 8. The Inconceivability of Zombies 7. There’s Something About Jerry  6. Pain Asymbolia and Higher-Order Theories of consciousness 5.  Philosophical Trends 4. A Short Argument that there [...]

New Philosophers’ Carnival

Is here Go Idealism!

No Sleep ‘Till Brooklyn

I’m back safe and sound in Brooklyn…still a bit dazed and confused, shocked and awed, and just generally jet lagged and irritable…I also just found out that I will be presenting my paper ‘Emotive Realism: A Mostly Neglected Kind of Expressivisim’ at the Second Annual Felician Ethics conference (in Jersey, so no flying!!!). This is [...]

Tucson Sucks!

So, the Tucson conference is winding down. I may post some thoughts about some of the talks later. But, all in all I have to say that it was disappointing, to say the least. It’s not that the talks were uninteresting, most of them were very interesting. The problem was that, on average, each presentation [...]