Over the last decade and a half — ever since I started the Rationally Speaking blog [1] which has now evolved into the webzine that is Scientia Salon — I have written about all sorts of core philosophical issues (e.g., ethics, metaphysics), as well as on much other stuff (e.g., the nature of science and pseudoscience) from a philosophical perspective. As I have explicitly put it in a collection of essays entitled Blogging as a Path to Self Knowledge [2], my reasons for writing have been (and continue to be) twofold: i) because I think that academics are in a privileged position that requires them to engage in discourse with the broader public which, directly or indirectly, grants them such position; ii) because I find the process of writing to be the best way for me to clarify my own thoughts. Often I truly don’t know (or at the very least I’m not sure of) what I think until I sit in front of my laptop and start typing away.
It is particularly in the spirit of (ii), if the reader will indulge me, that I offer the following considerations. They represent my current thoughts concerning a number of philosophical issues about which I have written and have either changed my mind or significantly elaborated my position over the past several years. The list is incomplete, and by necessity what follows are capsules, not fully articulated arguments. They are presented to provide stimulus for further thought and discussion to readers, as well as to allow myself a black-on-white benchmark to which to return in future years, to see how my own thinking might have evolved in the intervening time.
