I just realized, sometime early on in college, that I wanted to be a philosopher. I basically decided that I wanted to spend my life thinking as deeply and carefully and reflectively as I could about the nature of reality and our human engagement with it, and that taking a philosophical approach was the best way to go about doing this.

I do think that metaphysical exploration is like scientific exploration, in the sense that philosophers and scientists are both developing models of reality, and furthermore that we all rely to a significant extent on the idea that models which provide elegant, simple and satisfying explanations are more likely to be true.

We should listen to both philosophers and scientists, because the philosophical contribution is different from the scientific contribution, and both of them are worthwhile.

I reject what I see as flat-footed accounts of the fundamental structure of the world, where we somehow assume that, because ordinary experience involves middle-sized objects in space and time, that fundamental reality must be essentially like that.

While I do not agree with all of the claims made by experimental philosophers, especially those who seem to think xphi will somehow replace the rest of philosophy, I think xphi projects are interesting and important, I love Josh Knobe's work, and that these projects contribute something new and worthwhile to the philosophical conversation.

The distinctive contribution that metaphysics makes to our understanding of reality is first that it considers questions about features of reality that the sciences don't, such as the intrinsic nature of causation or the dynamic character of temporal experience.

Often the features metaphysicians are interested in, like causation, time, and essence, involve features that seem so basic or are so generally embedded in the way we experience the world that it takes special attention and focus to draw them out and develop an account of their nature.