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
Creationism and Intelligent Design Consequences of theistic evolution 3 Jul 201022 Jun 2018 So in parts one and two I proposed a problem and solution to the reconciliation of a limited theism with science, and in particular evolution. The aim was to preserve a complete scientific explanation, with no constraints or hedging or intervention, and to see if it could be made consistent… Read More
Philosophy A conversation about scientific evolution 14 Jul 2010 I recently had an interesting exchange with an anonymous poster called “Himself” on the talk.origins USENet group. I thought I’d put it up here with some links and the typos corrected. Since it’s visible on Google Groups, I’m not breaking any copyright here. Read More
Metaphysics Zombies of qualia and intentionality 16 Sep 201116 Sep 2011 Peter at Conscious Entities has a nice discussion of the above distinction I hadn’t thought of before (h/t Brandon): p-zombies that lack qualia and those that lack intentionality, and whether we think the latter is why there are no former. We know we have intentionality, so we think that to… Read More