Month: November 2007
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Novels of Manners
I’ve recently been reading Ellen Kushner’s novels. They are novels of manners set in a fantasy world. This can be tricky, as one of the attributes of a novel of manners is that all the characters attempt to adhere to a set of social conventions which is never stated or even discussed. Doing this in…
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A Science of Ethics
Can we ever have a science of ethics? That is, some way to determine how people ought to live, and some way to demonstrate its truth? And can there ever be some way to persuade people to live according to its guidelines? Philosophers and prophets have proclaimed the truth many times, and in fact their…
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Platonic Templates
As we all know, Plato argued that the objects we see in the world are just instantiations and specializations of abstract template classes. Any given chair is just an instance of the abstract class Chair. The existence of the abstract class is what permits us to identify the chair as a Chair. The very fact…
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Time Travel
Time travel is often viewed as impossible because of the grandfather paradox: if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, then you would never be born, and you would not kill your grandfather. To think about that properly, we have to set aside normal conventions of causality. We see cause and effect because…