Category Archives: Mark Johnston

Mark Johnston

The work announces that there is someone among us who is absolutely special, who has no peers, or “no neighbors” as Ludwig Wittgenstein once put it, by way of describing solipsism. The character of this person’s mental life is graced by a feature—“presence”—found in the mental life of no other.

As it turns out, we readers are particularly fortunate in that the author Caspar Hare, is ideally well placed to describe the special one whose experiences are the only experiences that are present. For, as it happens, Caspar Hare himself is the special one.

Mark Johnston, ‘Introduction’, in Caspar Hare, On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects, Princeton, 2009, p. xi

Mark Johnston

The manifest world of our common lived experience is not shown to be mere maya or entangling illusion by being shown to be a world with many boundaries that correlate not with the metaphysical joints, but only with our deepest practical concerns. When those concerns stand the test of criticism, the boundaries marked by differences at the level of ordinary supervening facts are as “deep” as anything ever gets.

Mark Johnston, ‘Reasons and Reductionism’, The Philosophical Review, vol. 101, no. 3 (July, 1992), p. 618