Archive for November, 2002

Does Personal Identity Matter?

Tuesday, November 26th, 2002

Does Personal Identity Matter?
Brad Weslake
University of Newcastle, Australia

The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that [...]

Against Objectivism

Tuesday, November 26th, 2002

Against Objectivism
Brad Weslake
University of Newcastle, Australia

Ethical egoism is, it is claimed by a recent commentator (Rachels, 2002, p. 191), a “wicked doctrine that is wickedly hard to refute”. In this paper I aim to provide a refutation of a particularly wicked form of ethical egoism, the objectivism of Ayn Rand. The refutation consists of two [...]

Dynamical models of mind and language

Tuesday, November 26th, 2002

Dynamical models of mind and language
Brad Weslake
University of Newcastle, Australia

Wittgenstein and P. Sraffa, a lecturer in economics at Cambridge, argued together a great deal over the ideas of the Tractatus. One day (they were riding, I think, on a train) when Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the [...]

They Can’t Do That

Tuesday, November 26th, 2002

Dozens of human-like dolls covered in fake blood and vomit were placed on the streets of Buenos Aires in a controversial arts project. Ambulances were called and passers-by distressed after seeing what they believed were dead bodies on the corners of some of the city’s major streets and avenues. One angry citizen told Clarin newspaper: [...]

The World Was Once Unbounded, Now We Think Even Space and Time are Closed Loops

Monday, November 25th, 2002

My spell-checker just flagged “reconception”, suggesting it be changed to “preconception”.

Influx

I will shortly post the essays that are the end product of my philosophy studies this year.

Numb

Tuesday, November 19th, 2002

Don’t use anaesthetic, use music.

More

Friday, November 15th, 2002

“Everyone believes that their favorite philosophers are misunderstood. The problem will be especially acute insofar as one’s favorite philosopher is oneself, but most of us extend the claim beyond this special case”.

(Peter Godfrey-Smith. “Dewey on naturalism, realism and science”, in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 69, Iss. 3, September 2002, pp. S25-S35).

Notes

Tuesday, November 12th, 2002

Kurt Vonnegut is 80.

Robert Musil is said to have travelled with three suitcases containing the manuscript and notes for The Man Without Qualities. There’s something tragically beautiful about the fact that he wrote 1800-odd pages of it before dying with it unfinished. And not unfinished in the sense of no end being written—unfinished in the [...]

Inventing Gods

Saturday, November 9th, 2002

[Thesis has been submitted, NBA season has started, and Australia is looking a good bet to win the Ashes, again. In other words, everything is fine.]

The following quote is from Alwyn Scott, “How Smart is a Neuron? A Review of Christof Koch’s Biophysics of Computation”, in Journal of Consciousness Studies, No. 5, 2000, pp. 70-75:

Inevitably [...]