Writing
Unlimited Associative Learning and the Natural Kind Status of Phenomenal Consciousness
Ginsburg and Jablonka's unlimited associative learning is best read not as phenomenal consciousness itself but as a nomological cluster of evidential properties, in the sense of Shea and Bayne's natural kind methodology. The two frameworks fit together, and the synthesis licenses a broader empirical research programme into non-human consciousness.
Transcendental Idealism and QBism: Knowing through Appearances in Kant and Quantum Theory
We read Kant's transcendental idealism as primarily an epistemic project and side with Allison's two-aspect interpretation. On that reading, QBism is the interpretation of quantum physics Kant would most plausibly endorse, since it treats the wavefunction as subjective belief while keeping observable outcomes empirically real.
No rules of induction: two responses to Hume's problem
Hume's problem asks what justifies induction when no universal schema can do the work without circularity. Samir Okasha and John Norton both respond by denying that inductive inference needs such a schema. This essay compares their approaches and argues they converge on a single no-rules account, in which licensing facts derived from prior empirical inquiry justify particular inferences.
Chronogeometric Fatalism and the Philosophy of Time in Special Relativity
Special relativity collapses Newton's separate space and time into a single Minkowski geometry. The most natural metaphysical reading is chronogeometric fatalism, on which all points of space-time, past, present and future, are equally real.