This month we talk some philosophy of mind with Joëlle Proust, Professor of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure and member of the Jean Nicod Institute. Click here to listen to our conversation.
You’re on your way to the supermarket to pick up the ingredients for a delicious vegetable stew. Upon arriving, you discover that you mistakenly left the shopping list on your dresser. Oh, no! You haven’t got time to go all the way back home, pick up the list, and return to the grocery store. Should you try to think back and recall the entire list, or should you just forget about the whole thing and get take-out? In order to make this decision, one of the things you’ll have do is determine whether you’ll be able to remember the whole thing. Whether you give up or try to mentally reconstruct the list will depend on how you evaluate your ability to remember things. That’s metacognition, in a nutshell: it’s what happens any time we evaluate our ability to perform some sort of mental task.
Al-Kindi may not be required reading for undergraduate philosophy majors these days, but the role he played in the history of philosophy was pivotal. Working in the ninth century, he was one of the first philosophers to try to unify the ancient Greek philosophical tradition with the tenets of Islam.
Many things are theoretically possible. In fact, just about anything you can imagine is possible in the broadest sense of the term. I might win the lottery, or win a tennis match, or travel to Mars. It isn’t likely that I’ll do any of these things, but it’s possible. A fiction author could come up with a story in which a series of extraordinary coincidences end up in my visiting the moon.
Are moral judgments, for example “stealing is wrong,” ever true? Are they even the kinds of things that can be true or false, or are moral judgments just fancy ways of expressing our feelings about stuff, so that “stealing is wrong” is just a fancy way of saying “Boo stealing!”? If there are some true moral judgments, what makes them true? Does the world include special, irreducible moral features, or are “moral facts” reducible to facts about the natural world?
Logic is traditionally assumed to have deductive reasoning as its subject matter. A valid deductive argument is one in which it’s impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. For instance, if it’s true that I’m a German composer, then it absolutely must be the case that I am a composer. I couldn’t not be one! The conclusion of the argument is just inevitable. Over the past century, philosophical and mathematical logicians have developed a wide array of formal techniques to study arguments of this sort.