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? | Lean toward: yes | | |
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? | Lean toward: Platonism | | |
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? | Lean toward: objective | | |
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? | Lean toward: yes | | |
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? | Lean toward: externalism | | |
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? | The question is too unclear to answer | is it a question about our knowledge of it or about its existence? | |
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
God: theism or atheism? | Accept: atheism | "No-need-for-God-hypothesis"-ism, especially in the domain of moral motivation. Accept a simple atheism in the domain of natural science. | |
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? | Lean toward: contextualism | | |
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? | Lean toward: Humean | | |
Logic: classical or non-classical? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Mental content: internalism or externalism? | Accept: externalism | | |
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? | Accept: moral realism | | |
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? | Accept: naturalism | | |
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? | The question is too unclear to answer | physicalism is on most (all?) accounts too implausible to make sense of its denial as a determinate view. | |
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? | The question is too unclear to answer | I lean toward a rather uncommon account of cognitivism. I could perhaps also opt for 'accept an intermediate view'. | |
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? | Accept: virtue ethics | | |
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? | Lean toward: disjunctivism | | |
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? | Accept: further-fact view | Not a further fact about Cartesian Egos, but further facts about social practices (centres of responsibility in networks of shared agency). | |
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? | Accept an intermediate view | | |
Proper names: Fregean or Millian? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | | |
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? | There is no fact of the matter | | |
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? | Lean toward: survival | | |
Time: A-theory or B-theory? | Insufficiently familiar with the issue | Forgot the meaning of the labels. I once was enthousiastic about the treatment of this in McGinn's *The Subjective View*. | |
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? | Reject both | No 'oughts' here | |
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? | Lean toward: correspondence | | |
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? | Lean toward: inconceivable | | |