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? | Accept: yes | | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Accept: Platonism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept: objective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Accept: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept: compatibilism | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: theism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept: rationalism | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept: non-Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept: classical | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: non-naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: non-physicalism | | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Accept: one box | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept more than one | accept deontology (largely Rossian non-absolute) and virtue ethics | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Accept more than one | theory of appearing, perhaps of a disjunctivist sort, with qualia as properties of the mind/perception but not as objects of perception | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept another alternative | personal identity consists of sameness of immaterial components of the person | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Accept an intermediate view | They all have non-absolute components of a theory that should include elements of all of them. But even that is secondary to the ideal political philosophy, which is unachievable in this life but still the best government, and that is rule by a perfect monarch. I thus favor Plato's position in the Statesman that we have to settle for second-best but should recognize a model with a perfect philosopher-king as the ideal government. When combined with traditional theism, this leads to theocracy by a benevolent God as the ideal government, but traditional theists can only hope for that in an afterlife and have to settle for a balancing of competing goods in this life. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Accept: Millian | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept: scientific realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Accept: death | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Accept: B-theory | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Lean toward: switch | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Accept: correspondence | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Accept: metaphysically possible | | |