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 | Fregean reduction. | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Accept: internalism | Bonjour's semi-conceptualism. | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | Accept: non-skeptical realism | Abductivism. | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept: libertarianism | Probably some form of agent-causation. I find E.J. Lowe's non-causal volitionist account appealing too. | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | I think the logical problem of natural evil and the evidential problem of evil both work. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept: rationalism | "Moderate rationalism," i.e. that a priori justifiable propositions are open to a posteriori falsification. | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Accept: invariantism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Accept: non-Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Accept: classical | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept: internalism | Intrinsic intentionality. | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | Moral platonism. | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: non-naturalism | Awww yess | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | Accept: non-physicalism | Either property dualism or a kind of non-Cartesian substance dualism. | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | Accept: cognitivism | | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept: internalism | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Accept: two boxes | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept more than one | Deontology and virtue ethics as discursive and instrumental engagements with the moral reality. | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Lean toward: qualia theory | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept: further-fact view | | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Accept: libertarianism | I identify as a kind of 'neo-mutualist individualist anarchist'. Or as a vanilla left-wing market anarchist. I think that the coercive state is illegitimate, that the arguments for the necessity of public government are always self-refuting, and that voluntary market, gift, and barter associations can provide better solutions than what states deliver. Secondly, I object to the hard distinction between egalitarianism and libertarianism. Egalitarianism has as a necessary condition a requirement for extreme libertarianism. We cannot have equal opportunity and equal exchange so long as State/government/power is left to its devices--it has a consistent history of creating monopoly and, "through letters of blood and fire", placing the means of production into the hands of autocratic ownership class through mass land expropriations and enclosures -- and thus inequality of both social and economic castes. Libertarians who are conscientious of their socialist roots recognize that equal negative rights are just as important as the disolucion of state-backed unequal exchange. | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Lean toward: Millian | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | Lean toward: scientific anti-realism | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Lean toward: survival | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Accept: A-theory | | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Lean toward: don't switch | | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Accept: correspondence | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possible | | |