Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Saturday, March 10, 2018

Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience: Lecture 2

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In his second lecture, James defines what he would 'religion' consider to be for the purposes of the lecture series. He stresses r...
Sunday, March 4, 2018

Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience: Lecture 1

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I have started reading William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience . Published first in 1902, this collection of twenty lecture...
Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Philosophy of mind: consider the children

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'Thanks' to a post on Crooked Timber I had the misfortune of finding David Bentley Hart's review of Daniel Dennett's new b...
Friday, August 11, 2017

Does philosophy produce knowledge?

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Recently I jumped, rather rashly, into a discussion about the purpose of philosophy. On his blog , philosopher Daniel Kaufman commented on t...
Sunday, July 9, 2017

What philosophy is "good for"

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There is a very strange discussion popping up from time to time in some of the blogs that I read, where somebody will claim that philosophy ...
1 comment:
Monday, September 5, 2016

Are brains machines?

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Recently I was somewhat amused to see an online discussion on the merits of philosophy as a research field turn to the question whether our...
Tuesday, July 19, 2016

I must be missing something

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As I continue to contemplate Ebach and Michael's recent paper From Correlation to Causation: What Do We Need in the Historical Science...
Friday, July 15, 2016

Freedom!

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In the light of two more recent rounds of the perennial Free Will discussion elsewhere, I think I now finally understand the incompatiblist ...
6 comments:
Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Experimental versus historical science

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Long time no blog; it seems to come to me in bursts. Anyway, a colleague has drawn my attention to a paper that has recently appeared, From...
Thursday, May 19, 2016

Life, consciousness, free will: words were defined to describe something

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From time to time, even in groups where you'd think people would be a bit more sceptical, somebody will suddenly pipe up and say somethi...
Monday, February 15, 2016

Structuralism

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It is interesting that a few weeks after learning that at least some proponents of paraphyletic taxa argue that phylogenetic systematics is ...
2 comments:
Thursday, November 20, 2014

The Dark Side of the Sun

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I have also just recently re-read one of Terry Pratchett's Science Fiction novels, The Dark Side of the Sun . Its message...
Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Real and difficult problems

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One argument that I have come across surprisingly often in recent times is this: Many smart people have thought hard about topic X and found...
Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Folk understanding of Free Will, part 2: Hopeless confusion?

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Continuing from here . So, about those two studies on folk perceptions of determinism and incompatibilism; these are two different issues ...
Monday, February 24, 2014

Folk understanding of Free Will, part 1: Does it matter?

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Over at one of my favourite blogs websites, two studies of folk philosophy have recently been discussed: what do average people, as oppos...
Friday, January 24, 2014

Are we our bodies?

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In a recent discussion on another blog somebody claimed that most people would not identify with their bodies but instead with their consci...
2 comments:
Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Hobgoblins

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Some time ago, deep in the understorey of the internet, I argued that somebody was advancing an intellectually inconsistent position, and wa...
Monday, October 28, 2013

Free will once more, with a growing realization

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Round and round it goes, perhaps forever. One may be forgiven for wondering whether one side is so sure that it is right that it is not ac...
7 comments:
Tuesday, October 15, 2013

In practice, people are determinists anyway

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Jerry Coyne once more raises the issue of free will , about which I have also written before , so I do not want to repeat myself. Instead, l...