Sometime in our lives, we, all of us, acquire the insight that nothing we experience is experienced for the first time; that life is merely a cycle that we all must go through, from birth, through adolescence to death; that the things children feel move into things adolescents feel, and into things older people feel. (Still,…

When you do philosophy of art and discuss for instance, paintings and photographs, it makes little sense to make universal claims about aesthetic values. It makes little sense to say what beauty is, full stop, as if it were an eternal idea or form in Plato’s heaven. The point is difficult to grasp but has…

If we want to understand why people do good, or how we can make them do good, we must look at their psychologies. Practices work because participants are dedicated to contribute to them in favourable manner. We may set up institutions to insure that people do good in practices, i.e. to regulate practices. But you…

Introspectivism I think that the problem is quite simple (but I may be wrong): once you believe that your mind is something in you, you must also think that the way to find out what the mind is is by looking inward (introspection), and that seems only logical. And because of this, you cannot know…

1. Philosophy of Perception as a branch in aesthetics regards the awareness of aesthetic qualities, properties or values. In short, it concerns the awareness of subjective properties of things and events. Here the philosophy of perception is a phenomenology of some kind. 2. Philosophy of Perception as a branch in epistemology regards the veridical—or illusory—nature…

Perhaps, our associations too, are mere brain waves. The interesting thing about them is that we shall try to understand them whenever they occur. (Just like our puzzlement over our dreams sets us to attempt at an interpretation). (I am, here, following up a previous argument.) I think Freud could be defended like this as…

Sometimes, the brain is in charge in my mind, though mostly, thank God, it isn’t. This morning I lay awake for an hour with a phrase in my mind from a tune by Krezip (“Does it never get any better?”—from All my life.) It just kept repeating—in the background, in the foreground. And it is…

The Argumentum ad Futuram is a fallacy for arguing from the assumed state of the future to say something to determine our choices in the present—it is no coincidence, I think, that the assumed future fits the views of the one appealing to it. The fallacy is meant to dismantle difficult ethical considerations. I came…

Dreams are boring. For the others. They are all subjectivity, and consist only of [tooltip title=”Gibson’s term” placement=”right”]affordances[/tooltip]. There are no non-realised affordances in a dream: everything happens for your sake. Hence, there are no choices or options for others to empathise with. Readings Gibson, J.J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. London, Hillsdale,…

In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein discusses the ambiguous duck-rabbit picture as illustrating a specific kind of seeing, seeing-as: we see the drawing now as a duck, now as a rabbit. Wittgenstein thinks seeing an aspect means seeing the internal relations of the thing with its surroundings. (The duck looks to the left, the rabbit to…