More Square

As I mentioned in my last post we are discussing the traditional vs modern square of opposition in my logic course (which did not go over well btw, most students reacted viscerally to the claim that modern logicians reject the entailment of the I proposition by the A proposition…to the point that one student exclaimed [...]

Does All Imply Some?

So in the logic course I am currently teaching we are about to start talking about the contrast between the modern and traditional square of opposition. The main difference, of course, is that poor Aristotle thought that if it was true that All A’s are B’s that made it the case that Some particular A [...]

Society for Consciousness Studies

I was looking at the program for the upcoming apa meeting in Boston and I was struck by how many groups and societies there are…and yet there is no Society for Consciousness Studies (though there is one for the Unconscious and there is a Minds and Machines ones as well). I wonder why this is? [...]

Plant Rights? Yeah Right!

Over at the Opinionator there is a very nice article examining the issue of whether we should eliminate meat-eating in nature if we could. Personally I think that I agree with McMahan’s conclusion that we have more reason to eliminate meat-eating in nature (if we could without great harm) than we do to preserve the [...]

Can We Think About Non-Existent Objects?

I am scheduled to record a conversation with Pete Mandik for Philosophy TV tomorrow on higher-order approaches to consciousness and in the course of preparing for it I was rereading Pete’s Unicorn paper where, among other things, Pete gives several arguments that we are in fact able to think about non-existent objects. I do not [...]

Three New Papers

This summer has been semi-productive for me and I have completed drafts of three new conference length papers that I hope to be shopping around later. These are all in various stages of revision/draftyness and I would appreciate any feedback/comments. 1. Explaining Consciousness and Its Consequences 2. The Higher-Approach to Consciousness: The Hot Ticket or [...]

Levine on the Phenomenology of Thought

On Wednesday I attended the inaugural session of the Graduate Center’s philosophy colloquium.  The speaker was Joe Levine and he wanted to examine two of the arguments for the phenomenology of thought as given by people like David Pitt and Charles Siewert and argue that they were not up to the task that supporters thought [...]