Evolution A letter to a high school student 14 Dec 2007 It’s a dangerous thing to let philosophers talk to high school students, in the main, for we tend to drown our audience in terminology and deep concepts (many of which turn out to be not so deep), but I do try to communicate clearly when it is needed. My kids… Continue Reading
Logic and philosophy X-phi in the NYT 8 Dec 2007 Courtesy of Brian Leiter’s blog comes a link to an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times about X-phi, or as it’s better known, Experimental Philosophy. This is an approach to thought experiments that tries to find out what people actually think before launching into the sorts… Continue Reading
Logic and philosophy Such a short honeymoon 1 Dec 2007 [Australian politics: look away] Oh dear. It took only seven days for the shine to wear off the Labor victory. Julia Gillard has outlined the priorities for education: computers and trades training centres in schools. Yep, that’s right, the single most important aspect of education in Australia is trade education… Continue Reading
Evolution The philosophy of classification 29 Nov 2007 The term “radical” is a very loose term. It basically means “something that differs wildly from the consensus” in ordinary usage. So I hope David Williams and Malte Ebach won’t take offense if I say that they have a radical interpretation of the nature of classification. In a couple of… Continue Reading
Humor What do colourless green ideas do? They sleep, furiously 27 Nov 2007 This little piece by netfriend Richard Harter, who apparently predates coal, serves to demonstrate that philosophers really aren’t clever enough at thinking up counterexamples… Continue Reading
Logic and philosophy Physicists on science 25 Nov 2007 I have a rule (Wilkins’ Law #35, I think) that if any scientist is going to draw unwarranted metaphysical conclusions, it will be a physicist, and in particular a cosmologist. Witness Paul Davies in the New York Times. Davies wants to argue something like this: Continue Reading
Evolution Explaining religion 4 – Wolves and gods 6 Nov 2007 The saying that “man is a wolf to man” comes from a saying of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but it is incomplete. The Latin is Homo homini aut deus aut lupus or “Man is either a god or a wolf to man”. I’m beginning to wonder if there is a difference… Continue Reading
Evolution Birds up 6 Nov 200718 Sep 2017 I can’t believe Laelaps beat me to this (shows how on the ball he is) but he’s just noted a paper that I watched getting written, and discussed in detail with Chris Glen, a very smart and talented young paleontologist, before I got to. So I will now, before he… Continue Reading
Evolution The library of the mind 5 Nov 2007 In a famous essay Borges wrote of an infinite library that contained all possible books (and most of it nonsense at that). The mind is not like that. It has only a few books in it. In the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, there are competing views of the nature… Continue Reading
Evolution Animals and rights 5 Nov 2007 What with Hollywood archetypes of “animal rights activists” coming out of the woodwork lately, Ryan Gregory and Larry Moran pose the following question: And so I ask, on what basis do you draw the sharp moral line between “humans” and “animals”, “human rights” and “animal rights”, “us” versus “them”? What… Continue Reading