The Golden Age of Islam 12 Oct 2009 3 Quarks Daily has a series by Namit Arora on the high period of Islamic culture to which we owe our knowledge of classical science and literature, not to mention a host of scientific developments. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here. Keep an eye on this one. History Science
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… Read More
Epistemology Domains and theories in science 19 Jun 201122 Jun 2018 We are getting to the tail end of this series. Here are the previous posts: The false analogy between species and art Pattern cladism and the myth of theory dependence of observation Species, phenomena and data More on phenomena Disambiguating the Theory-Dependence of Observation thesis (TDOT) In this post I… Read More
History The meaning of Christmas 22 Dec 201122 Jun 2018 Tony Piro creatively borrows from Peanuts. Click on the picture to see the full comic. Tony has Linus give a fairly standard view, that Christmas is based on prior religious traditions. He carefully avoids making Linus repeat the “Christmas is the birthdate of [insert deity or religious figure]” view, which… Read More