Saturday Night at the Oldies: My Darling Clementine
Saw this 1946 movie once again last night.  A heavily fictionalized version of the shootout at the O. K. Corral, it stars Victor Mature as Doc Holliday, Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp and Walter Brennan as Old Man Clanton.  The Mexican cutie's name is 'Chihuahua.'  They don't make 'em like this anymore. Now

Dennett's Dismissal of Dualism
Daniel Dennett is a brilliant and flashy writer, but his brilliance borders on sophistry. (In this regard, he is like Richard Rorty, another writer who knows how to sell books.) As John Searle rightly complains, he is not above "bully[ing] the reader with abusive language and rhetorical questions. . . ." (The Mystery of Consciousness, p. 115) An excellent example of this is the way Dennett dismisses substance dualism in the philosophy of mind: Dualism (the view that minds are composed of some nonphysical and utterly mysterious stuff) . . . [has]been relegated to the trash heap of history, along with

Conceivability, Possibility and Per Impossibile Reasoning
Here is an example of per impossibile reasoning from Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 1, art. 2: Even if there were no human intellects, things could be said to be true because of their relation to the divine intellect. But if, by an impossible supposition [per impossibile], intellect did not exist and things did continue to exist, then the essentials of truth would in no way remain. (tr. Mulligan) The gist of the passage is this: it is impossible that God not exist; but if he did not exist, then truth would not exist. Truth depends for its existence on a being whose

The De Dicto Objection to Substance Dualism
The modal arguments for substance dualism in the philosophy of mind require a possibility premise, for example, 'It is possible that a person exist disembodied,' or 'Possibly, a person becomes disembodied.' One question concerns the support for such a premise. Does conceivability entail possibility? Does imaginability entail possibility? And if neither entail possibility, do they provide sufficient evidence for it? I'm not done with these questions, but there is another vexing question that I want to add to the mix. This concerns the validity of the inference from 1. It is possible that there exist disembo

Soul, Conceivability, and Possibility: An Aporetic Exercise
I am puzzling over the inferential move from X is conceivable to X is (metaphysically) possible. It would be very nice if this move were valid. But I am having trouble seeing how it could be valid. I exist, and I have a body. But it is conceivable that I exist without a body. 'Conceivable' in this context means thinkable without broadly logical contradiction.   I distinguish between narrowly and broadly logical contradiction.  'Some cats are not cats' is NL-contradictory: it cannot be true in virtue of its very logical form.  (It is necessarily false, and its being necessarily f