Philosophy Science as atheistic 8 Aug 2009 If God is conceived as a being who belongs to the world of beings, even as the highest being, then the science whose object of research is precisely this world is of necessity atheistic. For its research takes account solely of phenomena that are objectifiable and at the disposal of… Continue Reading
Metaphysics On hierarchies 29 Jun 200922 Jun 2018 We often make an appeal to hierarchical relations, in social and political discourse, in religion, in metaphysics (or that odd part of it called mereology) and more recently in social behaviour in animals, called ethology. But what we don’t do much is discuss what it is that a hierarchy is,… Continue Reading
General Science Information and metaphysics 3 Apr 2009 There’s a famous anecdote about Wittgenstein and his friend Piero Sraffa by Norman Malcolm (Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir): Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same ‘logical form’, the same ‘logical multiplicity’, Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like… Continue Reading
Technology Why we’ll never be downloaded 4 Mar 2009 An interesting article is up at the New Atlantis by Ari Schulman, arguing that we will never be able to replicate the mind on a digital computer. Here I want briefly to argue there are other reasons for this. Continue Reading
Evolution Myth 7: Darwin thought that Australian aborigines were closer to apes than to Europeans 1 Mar 200925 Oct 2019 Actually, this one is better called “Darwin was a racist”, but as the text concerned is from the same source as those claims, I thought it might be easier to evaluate a single claim and generalise from that. Our gospel for today is chapters V and VI of The Descent… Continue Reading
General Science Laws, theories and models 21 Feb 2009 A 6th grade maths and science teacher emailed me about whether theories could become laws. Below the fold is his request and my reply. The short answer is that when laws grow up, they become theories, not the other way around. Continue Reading
General Science Metaphysics disclaimer 30 Jan 2009 Ron Amundson is a philosopher and historian of biology at the University of Hawai’i – Hilo who has done some great work in my field. So I was greatly amused and more than a little sympathetic to see this disclaimer linked to from Leiter’s blog: Continue Reading
Creationism and Intelligent Design Skewed views of science 16 Jan 2009 Larry Moran points us to the following video on what science is and why pseudoscience is not to be taught or accepted without serious evidence (which makes it science). My only comment to add is that emotional appeals are information and evidence, but they are information and evidence about the… Continue Reading
Administrative A mild apology 29 Nov 2008 I haven’t done much philosophical blogging lately. There are Reasons. I’m preparing to move to Sydney over the next few months (and there may be a period in which I have no laptop too), and trying to catch up on a bunch of projects I have in play and which… Continue Reading
Evolution The ontology of biology 2 – How to derive an ontology in biology 11 Nov 200818 Sep 2017 There have been several attempts to produce an ontology of biology and the life sciences in general. One of the more outstanding was Joseph Woodger’s 1937 The Axiomatic Method in Biology, which was based on Russell’s and Whitehead’s Principia and the theory of types. In this, Woodger attempted to develop… Continue Reading