A good summary article on intuitions in biology 21 Feb 2010 The Studia Philosophica Estonia is not a journal I regularly read, but this article – “The Role of Intuitions in Philosophy” – is a good introduction to the topic, and it’s free. I tend to think that “intuition” is an empty word, myself. I like the phrase “traditional faculty view” for its ambiguity – the authors mean “the traditional view that intuitions are a faculty of mind”, but I immediately thought of “intuitions come from faculty members” [of some philosophy department]. Philosophy
Evolution God and Evolution 5: The problem of chance 23 May 201324 May 2013 Many religious thinkers hold that chance is the enemy of God. God is omniscient in many theisms, and so if chance occurs, and chance is unpredictable even for God, then the reality of chance means that God does not exist. This doesn’t apply, of course, to gods that are limited… Read More
Epistemology Some of my recent talks 30 May 201222 Jun 2018 I just discovered SlideRocket, a Google app that displays slides, and so I thought I’d put up some of my talks. Here goes. I hope they work. This is a talk about whether God could create a world in which Darwinian accidents occur. It ended up as a paper in Zygon: This… Read More
Evolution God and evolution 2: The problem of creation 4 Apr 201322 Jun 2018 Objections to evolution from the particular perspective of religion come in three forms: the problem of creation, the problem of purpose and the problem of chance. All other objections are general philosophical ones, and I’ll discuss them under that heading. The problem of creation The majority of believers in the… Read More
That reminded me of something I read today on Peter van Inwagen’s essay “Modal Epistemology”. I’ll quote: “[a philosopher who does ‘all sort or fanciful modal judgments’] is unaware that the modal beliefs he expresses or presupposes when he says ‘we’d have had more room if we’d moved the table up against the wall’… and the modal beliefs he gives such confident expression to in his writings… have quite different sources. The former have their source in our ordinary human powers of ‘modalization’… the latter have their source in his professional socialization, in ‘what his peers will let him get away with saying’.”
What philosophers these days mean by the word ‘intuition’ today is pretty close to what Descartes meant by ‘preconceived opinion’, except that the former has an honorific connotation.
Oops. Delete the redundant word ‘today’ from that. I wish that this site allowed editing or deletion of comments.