The answers shown here are not necessarily the same provided as part of the 2009 PhilPapers Survey. These answers can be updated at any time.
Question | Answer | Comments | |
A priori knowledge: yes or no? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Lean toward: objective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | The question is too unclear to answer | Some moral practices make sense only if understood practically and causally. Other moral practices are probably counterproductive. I don't know that "determinism" as a global thesis is relevant to all of this. I doubt that determinism is true globally, but I don't think that does anything to help what some think free will is. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | Well, it could depend on what you think "God" names, but there seems not to be anything besides the natural world. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept: non-classical | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept another alternative | Moralities are plural but real. They consist of the shared social understandings and expectations of conduct that bind us to one another. | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept another alternative | I am a norm-expressivist about moralities in the plural. Moralities vary. However, I am a naturalist about the human good. Some moralities realize human good for those who practice them better than others, but that does not make them moralities to a greater degree than the moralities that more poorly realize human good. | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept another alternative | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept another alternative | I am a consequentialist in social and political philosophy. I am a Hegelian about human moralities. | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept: biological view | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Accept: egalitarianism | Contributive not distributive egalitarianism. And egalitarianism, as I understand it, is an issue in social philosophy, not political philosophy (which concerns questions of coercive power and force). | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Accept: Millian | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept another alternative | Natural ontological attitude (NOA). | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Accept: death | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Other | I don't think intuition-mongering about such imaginary cases is helpful. | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | The question is too unclear to answer | | |