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
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
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 [...]
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: [...]
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.
Don’t use anaesthetic, use music.
“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).
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 [...]
[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 [...]