I grew up loathing honey. I preferred jams: plum, orange. apple, ‘mixed fruit,’ gauva, mango, marmalade. Toasted bread with thick white cream and jam; never honey. Honey was just a little ‘sickly-sweet;’ its taste was a ‘little off.’ It crossed some permissible boundary of ‘sweetness’ and became cloying; it sent shudders through me. I couldn’tContinue reading “Honey And Me And Quining Qualia”
Tag Archives: philosophy of mind
RIP Hilary Putnam 1926-2016
During the period of my graduate studies in philosophy, it came to seem to me that William James‘ classic distinction between tough and tender-minded philosophers had been been reworked just a bit. The tough philosophers were still empiricists and positivists but they had begun to show some of the same inclinations that the supposedly tender-mindedContinue reading “RIP Hilary Putnam 1926-2016”
Artificial Intelligence And Go: (Alpha)Go Ahead, Move The Goalposts
In the summer of 1999, I attended my first ever professional academic philosophy conference–in Vienna. At the conference, one titled ‘New Trends in Cognitive Science’, I gave a talk titled (rather pompously) ‘No Cognition without Representation: The Dynamical Theory of Cognition and The Emulation Theory of Mental Representation.’ I did the things you do atContinue reading “Artificial Intelligence And Go: (Alpha)Go Ahead, Move The Goalposts”
The ‘Lone Killer’ And The Mentally Ill World
The invocation of mental illness and lamentations over ‘the state of the American mental health system’ are an inevitable accompaniment to news stories about lone white gunmen who carry out massacres. (c.f. Charleston massacre.) With that in mind, the following wise remarks by Helen De Cruz are worth pondering: People are not just motivated byContinue reading “The ‘Lone Killer’ And The Mentally Ill World”
Academic Writing In Philosophy: On Finding Older Writing Samples
Yesterday, while cleaning up an old homepage of mine, I found some old papers written while I was in graduate school. Overcome by curiosity–and rather recklessly, if I may say so–I converted the old Postscript format to PDF, and took a closer look. The first is titled ‘No Cognition Without Representation’; its abstract reads: AContinue reading “Academic Writing In Philosophy: On Finding Older Writing Samples”
Physical and Psychological Affordance
According to Wikipedia, ‘an affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling.’ (A photograph of a tea set in the Wikipedia entry bears the caption, ‘The handles on this tea set provide anContinue reading “Physical and Psychological Affordance”
The Mind is not a Place or an Object
Last week, I participated in an interdisciplinary panel discussion at the Minding the Body: Dualism and its Discontents Conference (held at the CUNY Graduate Center, and organized by the English Students Association.) The other participants in the panel included: Patricia Ticineto-Clough (Sociology), Gerhard Joseph (English), and Jason Tougaw (English). As might have been expected, with that group of participants theContinue reading “The Mind is not a Place or an Object”
The Physics-Philosophy ‘Kerfuffle’
The ongoing spat between physicists and philosophers–sparked by David Albert’s negative review of Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing–is the latest instance of a simmering conflict that seems to recur between the academic practitioners of discipline ‘X’ and philosophers who specialize in ‘philosophy of X.’ One kind of complaint madeContinue reading “The Physics-Philosophy ‘Kerfuffle’”
Samir Chopra 