Why Is Sex Valuable?

I’ve been working on a book on sexual ethics, and along the way I’ve been thinking about the question why sex is valuable, that is, why sex is something worth valuing. It’s not an uncommon view that sex is of limited value: It feels good, and pleasure is certainly good, but that’s about it; sex is not something that should really be central to people’s lives; it’s a mistake to make it so. I disagree. I wouldn’t argue that anyone has to care about sex, any more than anyone has to care about music, or architecture, or travel. But I do think that there is a way of approaching sex that shows that it can be worth valuing in the same way that one might value music or travel. I have always thought there was something not quite right about simply describing some people as `having a high sex drive’, and this is in part an initial attempt to explain why. Having a strong interest in sex is not the same as `having a high sex drive’ any more than having a strong interest in theatre is `having a strong theatre drive’.

A Note on the Strength of Disentangled Truth-Theories

Abstract

So-called `disentangled' truth-theories are supposed to prevent assumptions about the truth of statements in the object-language from inadvertently strengthening the background syntax. In earlier work, I proved some limitative results in an attempt to show that the strategy works, but those results leave several questions unanswered. We address some of them here. We also discuss a subtlety that has so far been overlooked in discussions of these theories.

Find it here: https://philpapers.org/rec/HECANO-6

This is another short paper that is a kind of appendix to an in-progress paper on the question whether there are or could be epistemically potent proofs of consistency. It may be submitted to a journal like Thought or Analysis at some point.

Some Remarks on 'Logical' Reflection

 Abstract:

Cezary Cieśliński has proved a result shows that highlights `logical reflection': The principle that every logically provable sentence is true. He suggests further that this result has a good deal of philosophical significance, specifically for the so-called `conservativeness argument' against deflationism. This note discusses the question to what extent Cieśliński's result generalizes, and just how strong `logical reflection' is, and suggests that the answers to these questions call the philosophical (though not the technical) significance of Cieśliński's result into doubt.  

On my website: http://rkheck.frege.org/pdf/unpublished/CieslinskiNote.pdf

On PhilPapers: https://philpapers.org/rec/HECSRO

This is a short paper, under 4000 words, which I will probably submit to Thought or Analysis. But mostly it's a kind of appendix to an in-progress paper on the question whether there can be a 'cogent' consistency proof. That one will be posted before long.