My philosophical views

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.

See also:

QuestionAnswerComments
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 oneaccept deontology (largely Rossian non-absolute) and virtue ethics
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?Accept more than onetheory 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 alternativepersonal identity consists of sameness of immaterial components of the person
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?Accept an intermediate viewThey 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