On punishment and reform

In terms of culpability, we seem to assume any agent could have done otherwise. Without being able to do otherwise, we don't usually consider an agent culpable. That much we often assume. And, in this case the emphasis is on a hypothetical past action. In terms of correction, the emphasis is on punishment and the failure of adherence to a past possibility. But why think focusing on what could have been done is preferable as a corrective?

A working word that still does no work

A few years back, I wrote a post in which I argued that the term "supervenience" doesn't do the work that physicalists seem to think it does (see here). I have been reading the essay on physicalism in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind written by Andrew Melnyk. In it he makes the same observation I was trying to make.

Common Moral Obligation

I find the tribalism in our current culture to be not only disturbing, but a sure-fire way to destroy our common life together. If we are to survive the current situation, together, then we need to re-appropriate an understanding of our common humanity.

Why I am Orthodox

When I first began to reconsider the Christian faith, the one thing I accepted without hesitation is the premise that there is something terribly wrong with us, as humans. We are wonderful. And, we are amazingly so. I don’t deny that. And yet, we are capable of horrendous evil. And, the evil we bring into this world is in no way necessary.

Big Brains

“…why should we be troubled by Leibniz’s point that if the brain were blown up to the size of a factory, so that we could stroll through it, we should not see thoughts? If we know enough neural correlations, we shall indeed see thoughts-in the sense that our vision will reveal to us what thoughts the possessor of the brain is having. If we do not, we shall not, but then if we stroll through any factory without having first learned about its parts and their relations to one another, we shall not see what is going on. Further, even if we could find no such neural correlations, even if cerebral localization of thoughts was a complete failure, why would we want to say that a person’s thoughts or mental images were nonphysical simply because we cannot give an account of them in terms of his parts?” Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Thirteenth-Anniversary Edition 2009) 26.

 

Indeed, why should we be troubled by Leibniz’s point? It is only troubling if we want very badly to conflate or reduce the mental to specific neural correlations. And in doing so, discard the ontological reality of our mental experience.

A Reductio for Eliminative Materialism

Can arguments for eliminative materialism be made without employing some aspects of so-called “folk psychology” and does it matter if they cannot? These are questions I want to explore.