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 | The categorical presumptions of the question are contradictory, and so there's no answer. The survey seems awfully conventional and pedestrian. | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Accept: nominalism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Accept both | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Other | I'm a process theorist. | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Reject both | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | But scientific realism, not philosphical realism. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Other | I my (processual) view, there's no tension between free will and determinism, but they are interdependent (not compatible). Question again seems very parochial. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Reject both | I reject both forms of epistemic foundationalism, a category in which I include Kant. | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Other | From my perspective, these alternatives don't mean much. For one thing, I wouldn't hypostatize knowledge. | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Reject both | The presumption here runs against contemporary science, which looks to singular causation and causal mechanisms. See laws as a reification of a mental constuct. | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Reject both | Logic a basis of truth only in a hypothetical limiting case and so is unrealistic or insufficient. | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept both | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept another alternative | I believe I can explain supervenience, and it transcends questions like this. | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Agnostic/undecided | | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Accept: sense-datum theory | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | I don't undertand the question. | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Other | While I'm egalitarian, I'm better described as orthodox communist. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Reject both | Good god, what a choice! Surely the question is very parochial? | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Accept: scientific realism | Of course, it depends on how we define "unobserables". | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | No idea what this question means, but sounds like a religious issue. | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Reject both | I reject both McTaggert views and am something between an actualist and presentist. | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | Not my understanding of what philosophy is. | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Reject all | In a sense, I reject the category. | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | There is no fact of the matter | You've got to be kidding! What kind of question is this? It would appeal to college sophomores? | |