Although the experimental philosophy movement is only a few years old, it has already led to a surge of new research -- including experimental studies that explore people's ordinary understanding of morality, free will, happiness and other key philosophical issues. The aim is to dive right into the messy real world and to use psychological experimentation to get at the roots of philosophical problems.

Pain is the most prominent member of a class of sensations known as bodily sensations, which includes itches, tickles, tingles, orgasms, and so on. Bodily sensations are typically attributed to bodily locations and appear to have features such as volume, intensity, duration, and so on, that are ordinarily attributed to physical objects or quantities. Yet these sensations are often thought to be logically private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge for those who have them. Hence there appear to be reasons both for thinking that pains (along with other similar bodily sensations) are physical objects or conditions that we perceive in body parts, and for thinking that they are not. This paradox is one of the main reasons why philosophers are especially interested in pain. One increasingly popular but still controversial way to deal with this paradox is to defend a perceptual or representational view of pain, according to which feeling pain is in principle no different than undergoing other standard perceptual processes like seeing, hearing, touching, etc. But there are many who think that pains are not amenable to such a treatment.

Contemporary analytic philosophers of mind generally use the term "belief" to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. To believe something, in this sense, needn't involve actively reflecting on it: Of the vast number of things ordinary adults believe, only a few can be at the fore of the mind at any single time. Nor does the term "belief", in standard philosophical usage, imply any uncertainty or any extended reflection about the matter in question (as it sometimes does in ordinary English usage). Many of the things we believe, in the relevant sense, are quite mundane: that we have heads, that it's the 21st century, that a coffee mug is on the desk. Forming beliefs is thus one of the most basic and important features of the mind, and the concept of belief plays a crucial role in both philosophy of mind and epistemology. The "mind-body problem", for example, so central to philosophy of mind, is in part the question of whether and how a purely phys

In philosophy, the issue of personal identity concerns a number of loosely related issues, in particular persistence, change, time, and sameness. Personal identity is the distinct personality of an individual and is concerned with the persisting entity particular to a given individual. The personal identity structure appears to preserve itself from the previous version in time when it is modified. It is the individual characteristics arising from personality by which a person is recognized or known. John Locke considered personal identity (or the self) to be founded on consciousness, and not on the substance of either the soul or the body.

Some lucky people divide their time between marvelous places like London and the Lake District. I live in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas all the time. However, I do divide my time between doing different things. I spend a lot of my time writing philosophy for the general reader. Besides that, I teach philosophy and keep track of two wonderful ten year olds who happen to be my children

This blog began as place for me to air out parts of a manuscript on the happy life (see here for links to posts which are part of the draft), and has evolved into a place where I continue work on my own views, and respond to those of others, about what exactly "happiness" amounts to.

I shall here propose a taxonomy of views on persons