A quote from Lewis Carroll 11 Jun 202411 Jun 2024 Well, it’s actually from Charles Dodgson’s The Game of Logic 1887: The world contains many Things (such as “Buns”, “Babies”, “Beetles”, “Battledores”, &c.) ; and the Things possess many Attributes (such as “baked”, “beautiful”, “black”, “broken”, &c: in fact, whatever can be “attributed to”, that is “said to belong to”, any Thing, is an Attribute). Whenever we wish to mention a Thing, we use a Substantive : when we wish to mention an Attribute, we use an Adjective. People have asked the question “Can a Thing exist without any Attributes belonging to it?” It is a very puzzling question, and I’m not going to try to answer it : let us turn up our noses, and treat it with contemptuous silence, as if it really wasn’t worth noticing. But, if they put it the other way, and ask “Can an Attribute exist without any Thing for it to belong to?”, we may say at once “No: no more than a Baby could go a railway-journey with no one to take care of it ! ” You never saw “beautiful” floating about in the air, or littered about on the floor, without any Thing to be beautiful, now did you ? Chapter 1, §1, page 2 The really lovely thing here, apart from the wonderful alliteration [“Buns”, “Babies”, “Beetles”, and “Battledores” is my new band name] is that Dodgson gives, in one paragraph, a summary of metaphysics, philosophy of language, and logical classification. The rest of the book is pretty good too. Logic and philosophy Metaphysics Philosophy
Evolution God and evolution 6: Is Darwinism atheism? 24 May 201324 May 2013 Many Christians and Muslims, and to a lesser extent Jews, think that Darwinian evolution requires or implies atheism, a charge first brought when Darwin was still alive. The Princeton theologian Charles Hodge argued this in his What is Darwinism? (1874). But Darwin himself, and many of his followers such as… Read More
Creationism and Intelligent Design Random thoughts about God and evolution 27 Jun 2010 As some may know, I am writing a couple of book chapters to try to sell a proposal to a publisher for The Nature of Classification, a book I am coauthoring with Malte Ebach. I bring the philosophy and he brings the knowledge. However, this means I am not devoting… Read More
History A philosophical apology from 1919 for not being pro-war 21 Jan 201221 Jan 2012 Leiter posted the PDF of this on his site. I can’t help but reproduce some of the choicer quotes: “DEAR FRIEND: Your letter gently but un-mistakably intimates that I am a slacker, a slacker in peace as well as in war; that when the World war was raging bitterly I… Read More