Category: Eric Schwitzgebel
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Might there be excellent reasons to embrace radical skepticism, of which we are entirely unaware? You know brain-in-a-vat skepticism — the view that maybe last night while I was sleeping, alien superscientists removed my brain, envatted it, and are now stimulating it to create the false impression that I’m still living a normal life. I…
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Every year’s end at UC Riverside, the philosophy faculty meet for three hours “to discuss the graduate students”. Back in the 1990s when I was a grad student, I seem to recall the Berkeley faculty doing the same thing. The practice appears to be fairly widespread. After years of feeling somewhat uncomfortable with it, I’ve…
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I have a new theory of the jerk, just out in Aeon. The piece uses the term “idiot” in several places to characterize how the jerk sees the world: “I’m important, and I’m surrounded by idiots!” In light of Shelley Tremain‘s remarks to me about the history of the word “idiot”, I’m wondering whether I…
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Must an infinitely continued life inevitably become boring? Bernard William famously answers yes; John Fischer no. Fischer’s case is perhaps even more easily made than he suggests — but its very ease opens up new issues. Consider Neil Gaiman’s story “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories” (yes, that’s the name of one story): He nodded…
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Ruth Millikan’s Dewey Lecture has been getting a lot of favorable attention in the blogosphere recently. Rightly so. But I want to challenge one part of it that most philosophers seem to like. I’ll quote almost all of the relevant two paragraphs, since when I try to trim I think I do a disservice to…
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On the basis of this year’s partial hiring data, Marcus Arvan notes that the majority of tenure track hires (a whopping 88%) are from people of Leiter-ranked programs. Only 12% of hires are from people of unranked programs. Also, 37% of all tenure track hires come from just 5 schools, the Leiter top 5 list…
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We might soon be creating monsters, so we’d better figure out our duties to them. Robert Nozick’s Utility Monster derives 100 units of pleasure from each cookie she eats. Normal people derive only 1 unit of pleasure. So if our aim is to maximize world happiness, we should give all our cookies to the monster.…
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Chutes and Ladders, if you didn’t know, isn’t just a game of chance. It’s a game of virtue. At the bottom of each ladder a virtuous action is depicted, and at the top we see its reward. Above each chute is a vice, at the bottom natural punishment. The world of Chutes and Ladders is…
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I’m thinking (again) about beeping people during aesthetic experiences. The idea is this. Someone is reading a story, or watching a play, or listening to music. She has been told in advance that a beep will sound at some unexpected time, and when the beep sounds, she is to immediately stop attending to the book,…
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