Humor How to win an argument 15 Jul 201215 Jul 2012 It’s basically a slippery slope: As always click through. Continue Reading
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… Continue Reading
Epistemology Metaphysical determinism 20 May 201227 Aug 2012 There is a hypothesis called the Sapir-Whorf Thesis (also known as linguistic relativity) in language that one can only think what one’s language permits you to think, and indeed forces you to think. This idea that some conceptual scheme can determine how you think is widely held. It appears again… Continue Reading
History Hume’s Dialogues: A coloured edition 18 Mar 201212 Feb 2019 Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is one of the very best philosophical works ever written, as I was reminded this morning while seeking a passage. But it is not easily available in a decent format online. Sure, you can download a facsimile of the second edition (1779) from Archive.Org, and I… Continue Reading
Epistemology What, however, is the EAAN? 4 Mar 20124 Mar 2012 [Previous posts: One and Two] I may have been too hasty in my acceptance that Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism was not what I had originally given. As commenter Nick Matzke pointed out, Plantinga seems to be doing a bit of historical revision here. In the version he gives now,… Continue Reading
Epistemology Plantinga’s EAAN revisited 3 Mar 20123 Mar 2012 Blogs are places where one tosses out a hastily constructed piece of argument, or commentary, and not where one slowly and thoughtfully writes something that one will eventually earn an income from (unless you are PZ Myers). So when I responded to Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, I did so… Continue Reading
Epistemology Doxastic biases and arguments for religion (and other things) 18 Feb 201218 Feb 2012 Helen De Cruz has the results of a fascinating survey on how various arguments for and against the existence of God are treated by philosophers… according to their general stance – atheist, agnostic, or theist. Basically it considers not whether people think the arguments are right (a common mistake scientists… Continue Reading
History Quote: Nominalism 16 Feb 201216 Feb 2012 Nominalism has often been misunderstood in the past, perhaps because of the associations of the word itself. Properly conceived, nominalism has nothing to do with names. It is, quite precisely, the thesis that everything which exists is an individual, and is moreover an individual in itself, and not merely as a… Continue Reading
Biology Did Popper and Quine invent “Aristotelian essentialism”? 7 Feb 201221 Jun 2018 There are many narratives told about evolution. One of the most widely told is the Essentialism Story, replayed in textbook, popular storytelling and philosophy alike. It goes like this: Before Darwin, biologists were constrained by essentialist thinking, in which they were committed to species being natural kinds where there were… Continue Reading
Epistemology Plantinga’s EAAN 31 Jan 201231 Jan 2012 A post now up at the Philosopher’s Carnival discusses Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), and comment how it is like (not exactly the same) as a global skepticism argument being self-defeating. Plantinga’s argument goes like this: P1. If evolution is true, then we have modified monkey brains. P2…. Continue Reading