Unlike art which contains a message, wine conveys nothing, it has no intellectual or cognitive content

I have a general moral: great philosophers may be great, but that is not a reason to follow them. Don't be a follower. Work it out for yourself.

Music is one of my big interests - I once had a rather fanciful ambition to be a singer - and of course music is philosophically fascinating. What it is for music to express emotion strikes me as one of the most difficult questions - it's hard to say what it precisely means, although it plainly does mean something. But whenever I have tried to say something about this, it has come out as either banal or pretentious or both.

Wine is not discovered but made: it is an artifact that can be appraised that can be appraised aesthetically

A lot of humanists treat religion as if it were simply a kind of rival cosmological hypothesis, and that this is all it is. My view is that to the extent that religions are cosmological hypotheses, this is not the only important thing about them, and we - atheists- will never get a proper understanding of what religion is if we focus too much on the cosmology.

There are no a priori obstacles to the scientific knowledge of the mind, but the scientific knowledge of the mind is not all the knowledge of the mind that there is. This is not an objection to science, it is just a distinction between different kinds of knowledge.

The wine itself has aesthetic value; but what it is for a wine to have aesthetic value cannot be understood without making reference to the experience to tasting it