For one thing, I think that there are questions which philosophers raise which, although science bears on them, are not typically the central focus of those who work in the sciences. At the same time, I don't have a view of philosophy which marks it out as different in kind from scientific work

When I think about discussions at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a group which includes not only philosophers and psychologists, but also computer scientists and linguists, it is noteworthy that one can't always tell just from the content of particular contributions from the audience, whether a given questioner is a philosopher or an empirical scientist.

Epistemologists should be concerned with knowledge and justification and so on, not our concepts of them; philosophers of mind should be concerned with various features of our mental life and the large-scale structure of the mind, not our concepts of mind, or consciousness, or anything else

There has certainly been a great deal of work addressing the relationship between naturalism and the first-person perspective. Quite a number of philosophers have suggested that there are features of the first-person perspective that naturalism just cannot accommodate, whether it be qualitative character, or consciousness, or simply the ability we have to think of ourselves in a distinctively first-person manner.

When I got to college, I planned to be a math major, and, in addition to signing up for some math courses, I decided to take some philosophy. Quite by chance, I took a philosophy of science course in which the entire semester was devoted to reading Locke's Essay. I was hooked. For the next few semesters, I took nothing but philosophy and math courses, and it wasn't long before I realised that it was the philosophy that really moved me.

Chemists in earlier centuries were quite interested in the nature of acids. They had no interest in analysing their concept of acid. After all, they knew that their understanding of acids was at a fairly primitive level, and what they wanted to do was understand something about the world better - the nature of acidity - not something about their own concepts.

What I hankered for was an account of knowledge which would do far more than get our intuitions about cases right; I wanted a kind of account which would somehow be explanatory.