I disagree with the widely held view that it is metaphysical necessity, not nomological, that matters in the mind/body problem.

I disagree with the widely held view that it is metaphysical necessity, not nomological, that matters in the mind/body problem.

The racial categories that are used in a given society (for example, in contemporary America) are biologically meaningless, but sometimes it turns out that a vernacular racial category has biological reality.

Instead of thinking of the question of race genealogically, and leaving it open whether vernacular races are genealogical units, the interest in biomedicine has been to determine whether vernacular racial categories are medically useful in diagnosis and treatment. There is on-going debate about this.

Some philosophical arguments (e.g., in connection with the mind/body problem) look pretty good, while others (e.g., those that criticize moral realism) do not.

In the history and literature courses I took, epistemological questions came to interest me most. What makes one explanation of the French Revolution better than another? What makes one interpretation of "Waiting for Godot" better than another? These questions led me to philosophy and then to philosophy of science.

The rabid opposition to group selection has now considerably subsided. In the process, the conceptual structure of evolutionary theory has become clearer, as have the relationships that connect different theoretical approaches.