Engines of Thought

I have an article in Issue 41 of The Philosophers' Magazine, second quarter of 2008. It's all about how actually doing and making things, interacting with the world, is useful for understanding some of things philosophers find puzzling - eg, how we have knowledge of the external world; the nature of mind-body interaction; the link between theory and reality. These are all areas where scepticism creeps up as a philosophical position, but this paper argues that looking from an engineering point of view, where once can successfully engineer bits of the physical world (including making things like prosthetic limbs that function by exploiting the means by which mind and body interact) is hard to be a sceptic.