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 | I believe Logic, Mathematics and Normative Ethics are a priori disciplines all of which deliver knowledge. | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Accept another alternative | Mysterian, numbers exist but abstract is mostly a name for things whose inner nature we do not understand (they are NOT in space, NOT in time, they do NOT enter into causal relations - what positive knowledge we have about them after all). | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Other | Intersubjective | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: internalism | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | Contextualist response to the skeptic. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Lean toward: libertarianism | I take it for granted that there is free will and I believe that the compatibilist sense in which there is free will is too thin. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | There is not any good reason to believe in God, there are good reasons not to believe it (the problem of evil, paradoxes about omnipotence, omniscience, free will, relation to time, relation to space and the list goes on...) | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept: rationalism | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Lean toward: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept: non-Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Lean toward: classical | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | Naturalism is an umbrella term. Methodologically, (which is I believe the intended sense)I do not reject science, in fact I think it is obvious that it provides useful data for philosophical theorizing but I also do not accept that science and philosophy are continuous in the strong quinean sense. | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | If physicalism entails that all facts known by physics at the end of the enquiry fix all other facts it is false. If it means that consciousness arises from nonconscious stuff it it is probably true (being nothing over and above it - dualism is false). | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Accept: one box | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept: virtue ethics | Although there is a lot to be said for the other two approaches, I think Virtue Ethics is the right approach to morality and can't or shouldn't be revised in order to be reconciled with the other two. | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Accept another alternative | Intentionalist theory of perception | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Lean toward: further-fact view | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Lean toward: communitarianism | | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Lean toward: Fregean | The semantic content of a proper name is not exhausted by its referent. Frege's Puzzle and Negative Existential taught us better. | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Lean toward: scientific realism | Structural 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? | Accept: switch | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Accept another alternative | Inflationary, truth is a robust property such as goodness. | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possible | Either zombies are metaphysically possible or mysterianism is true and there are facts about consciousness of which we are cognitively closed. If the later then that would explain why zombies seem conceivable. The conceivibility of zombies would then just reveal a fact about our cognitive limitations and not about the ontological or metaphysical nature of consciousness. | |