“If you drop a hammer on your foot, is it real or is it just your imagination? You can run that test, you know, a couple of times, and I hope you come to agree that it’s probably real.” –Bill Nye
Search Results for: scientism
Talking Back to David Brin (on Scientism, the Self, and Conversation)
As I’ve acknowledged, our conversation with David Brin was more monologue, and though we tried to redeem that with the follow-up episode, that still didn’t serve the purpose of actually confronting David with our objections to his views (and his style, for that matter) and getting his reasoned reactions. Well, I had another opportunity to close the circle. He had Continue Reading …
Scientism and Scientific Sensationalism
Not long after I wrote this post linking to Isaac Chotiner’s negative review of Johah Lehrer’s Imagine and its “fetishization of brain science,” Lehrer was forced to resign from The New Yorker for fabricating Bob Dylan quotes. A lot has been written about the meaning of Lehrer’s transgression; but I was bothered less by the distortion of relatively trivial facts than the use Continue Reading …
Hannah Arendt on Scientism
The question of the “pernicious influence” of scientism on modern life and philosophy gets raised fairly often here at PEL. I get the sense that Wes and Seth think the influence ‘quite pernicious’ while Mark thinks ‘not so pernicious’. (Correct me if I’m wrong guys). So I thought it would be helpful to clarify what is implied by the term, Continue Reading …
The Pernicious Influence of Scientism
Alright, Mark has successfully baited me into a response on the issue of scientism. I should begin by saying that Mark has an interesting reading of Dennet that makes him out not to be a reductionist (as I and many others interpret him). I won’t address that here; I’m more interested in the general question of the influence of scientism Continue Reading …
Dennett on Brights vs. Murkies (Plus Dreaded Scientism!)
My point in posting notes on Dennett was just to post notes on Dennett, not to start a whole thing, but the discussion there got so critical so quickly that I felt the need to defend at length why I think he’s worth reading (to me, at least). Our friend Burl has posted a video of Dennett speaking in response Continue Reading …
Ep. 263: Lise Van Boxel’s “Warspeak” on Strategies for Valuing (Part One)
On Warspeak: Nietzsche’s Victory Over Nihilism (2020) with Dylan, Seth, and guests Michael Grenke and Jeff Black.
What’s a viable counter-ideal to the asceticism that Nietzsche thought is so pervasive? Lise’s book works out strategies for re-valuing that emphasize Nietzsche’s positive comments about the feminine and the power of words.
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Ep. 228: Social Construction of Race (Appiah, Mills) (Part Two)
Continuing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections” (1994), Charles Mills’s “But What Are You Really?, The Metaphysics of Race” (1998), and Neven Sesardic’s “Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept” (2010) with guest Coleman Hughes.
Racial classifications vary geographically, therefore race is socially constructed. Given this, can we retain the positive aspects of group identification without hierarchies and what Appiah calls “imperialism of identity”?
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End song: “Tired Skin” by Alejandro Escovedo, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #60.
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Ep. 226: Francis Bacon Invents Science (Part One)
On Sir Francis Bacon’s New Organon (1620).
Bacon claims to have developed a new toolset that will open up nature to inquiry in a way that wasn’t possible for ancient and modern natural philosophy.
Mark, Wes, and Dylan consider how much what Bacon describes resembles modern scientific method, talk through Bacon’s “four idols” that interfere with impartial inquiry, and consider how Bacon’s method fits in with his larger political-ethical-religious views.
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Ep. 192: “The Closing of the American Mind”: Allan Bloom on Education (Part One)
On Allan Bloom’s 1987 best-selling polemic. What is the role of the university in our democracy? Bloom thinks that today’s students are conformist, relativistic, and nihilistic, and that great books and thinking for thinking’s sake are the cure.
Continued on part 2, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition now, plus an exclusive follow-up discussion. Please support PEL!
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Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVIII: Charles Taylor—The Dark Abyss of Time
In our last article we explored Charles Taylor’s concept of “the buffered self,” a peculiar kind of self-consciousness engendered by Enlightenment rationalism, and which has become customary (at least for educated elites) in our own time. We saw how it can be at once a source of pride, a profound source of accomplishment and self-worth, and also a source of Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XVI: Did Medieval Islamic Theology Subvert Science?
Part of the way the prestige of science has been established in our own time is through the rhetoric of favorable contrasts. In previous articles, we’ve seen one instance of this contrast in the tripartite division of European history: rational inquiry flourished in the ancient world, withered in the medieval times, and was revived again in the time of the Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part VI: Jonathan Hedley Brooke, Complexity Thesis
“Serious scholarship in the history of science has revealed so extraordinarily rich and complex a relationship between science and religion that general theses are difficult to sustain. The real lesson turns out to be complexity.” –Jonathan Hedley Broke
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part II: Ian Barbour—The Conflict Model
“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” –Richard Dawkins
Against Debate
Why the typical model of public argumentation, where two adversaries square off, is not the best model for philosophy and not good for our podcast.
Topic for #96: Oppenheimer and the Rhetoric of Science Advisers
We interviewed Lynda Walsh about her book “Scientists as Prophets,” focusing on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s rhetoric about the boons and dangers of science.
Conversation vs. Crossfire (Philosophy, Arrogance, and the David Brin Episode)
Some of the initial listener reaction to our David Brin episode harkens back to similar comments we got about our Pat Churchland episode, our first attempt at including a celebrity author in the discussion. As Seth commented right after the recording with David, there was little purchase on his edifice in which to plant a foothold in real time. I Continue Reading …
Evolution is Rigged! A Review of Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos”
Thomas Nagel, a famous philosopher if there is such a thing in America, has written a book a bold title: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. The main title invites you to settle into your armchair for an evening of speculative meditation; the subtitle orders you to the barricades, in preparation for Continue Reading …
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Luke Muehlhauser on Modern Rationalism (Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot)
I’m generally skeptical when someone proclaims that “rationality” itself should get us to throw out 90%+ of philosophy. So I was a bit puzzled when someone on our Facebook group pointed at some articles by Luke Muehlhauser (specifically “Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline” and “Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant”), host of the excellent Conversations from the Continue Reading …
Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos
[Editor’s Note: Here’s a post by Getty from our Hume/Smith on ethics episode. Incidentally, Getty will be leading a Not School Reading group on Harry Frankfurt’s The Reasons of Love. Go join.] Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at NYU, is notorious for his heterodox philosophical positions (this was discussed a bit on PEL here). He is a scientific Continue Reading …
Voltaire and Evolutionary Biology
[From friend of the podcast Adam Arnold] In regards to the latest episode on Candide and the continuing discussion of scientism and evolution on the blog, it is interesting to look back on the classic article by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin on the “adaptationist programme” in evolutionary biology. In “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: Continue Reading …
“Be Reasonable!”
I wanted to expand a bit on the critique of reason as mentioned in my previous post on Rand, and readers should keep in mind that this is chiefly a response to a strain I’ve picked up on in popular culture which may or may not accurately capture anything Rand actually said (though it does match my 20+ year old Continue Reading …
Contemporary Neuroscience and Free Will
Contemporary neuroscience is not a challenge to free will, according to Eddy Nahmias: Most scientists who discuss free will say the story has an unhappy ending—that neuroscience shows free will to be an illusion. I call these scientists “willusionists.” … Willusionists say that neuroscience demonstrates that we are not the authors of our own stories but more like puppets whose Continue Reading …
Our Negative Incapability: Optimism, Knowingness, and American Exceptionalism
In light of our recent recording on Voltaire’s Candide (to be published in a few weeks), I’ve been thinking lately about the role of optimism in contemporary American culture (Candide critiques a kind of optimism in vogue at Voltaire’s time that he associated with Leibniz’ “best of all possible worlds” theory). A recent piece by Oliver Burkeman defends negative thinking: Though much of this Continue Reading …
Brian Leiter’s New Philosophical Categories
A really good interview with Nietzsche scholar and opinionator Brian Leiter appears in 3:AM Magazine, where he drops pithy quotes on Obama, Nietzsche, Marx, and Foucault. But he also appears to have a new argument to sell. Leiter advocates a new way to divide the philosophical canon, not into “contintentals” or “analytics,” but rather into “naturalists” and “anti-naturalists”. You can also Continue Reading …
Topic for #48: Merleau-Ponty on the Role of Perception in Knowledge
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus–his equivalent to Being & Nothinginess or Being & Time–is The Phenomenology of Perception. It is reputed (by Seth, at least) to complete Heidegger’s project by paying proper attention to our embodiedness: we have bodies, with specific perceptual limitations and are not only culturally but physically situated in ways that (as Heidegger insisted) make Cartesian doubt a Continue Reading …
What is a Philosophical Explanation?
On some comments to a recent post by Mark on Sam Harris and the ought/is distinction, I noted that Harris assumes that “happiness” (or “flourishing”) is an un-problematic concept — a well-established ruler against which one can easily measure the success or failure of behaviors. Hence when he claims that science can tell us what is right and wrong — Continue Reading …
Sam Harris on the Is/Ought Distinction
Sam Harris got a lot of grief on our Churchland episode. Whatever the difficulties that Churchland (and allegedly Hume) may have with the is/ought distinction, Harris provides a much easier target for this kind of criticism. Here’s Harris specifically responding (starting around 1:40) to the is/ought distinction: “a firewall between facts and values in our discourse:” Watch on YouTube. He Continue Reading …
“Softballs” on the Churchland Episode
Faraone, a commenter on our Facebook page, says: The Churchland episode was disappointing. You had a controversial academic who has made some bold and dubious claims during her career, and you spent your time tossing softballs to-and-fro. If you could not think-up challenging questions on your own, you could have read the many reviews of her book. Instead, it appeared Continue Reading …
McGinn vs. Ramachandran on The Tell-Tale Brain
We’ve talked quite a bit recently about neuroscience, not to mention scientism — which again, I take to be: the idea that science is applicable to any domain of inquiry that is meaningful, and will inevitably provide a solution to all meaningful questions Mark calls it “the dreaded scientism,” I think because he doubts it’s so prevalent or powerful; whereas Continue Reading …
“Blue Collar Philosophy” on Socrates’s Elitism
Though I’ve not yet actually posted the topic announcement yet (we’re still dithering about which chapters to focus on), episode 40 will be on Plato’s Republic, wherein Socrates states unequivocally that those controlled by reason (i.e. the philosophers like Socrates) are just plain better than the rest of the people, and a just state will put the philosophers in charge. Continue Reading …
“The Nation” on Brooks on Cognitive Neuroscience
We’ve bashed NY Times columnist David Brooks before on this blog for his attempts at philosophy, and I absolutely feel for the guy from a logistical perspective: he’s not an academic that can take a sabbatical and hole up to write and revise. He’s more or less a blogger who has to fumble around every few days to figure out Continue Reading …
Lawrence Cahoone on Rorty: Bridging Analytic and Continental Philosophy
Richard Rorty: A friend of Dan Dennett (and his dreaded scientism : ). A neo-pragmatist. An analytic philosopher who began teaching around the mid-20th-century, he eventually turned against its scientism. Rorty felt that 20th-century analytic thought was going down the wrong track by taking up the same sort of epistemological foundationalist project as Descartes. Rorty saw the narrow sense-data and Continue Reading …
“New” Atheism as Cultural Movement
An article by Paul Pardi (“Philosophy News Service”) at the Huffington Post sums up the significance of “new atheism:” 1. The arguments of Harris, Dennett, Dawkins and Hitchens tend not to be “new” and don’t engage the actual arguments of liberal theologians. 2. As a social movement, they’re nonetheless affecting the perception that the mass of people have on “the Continue Reading …
Sam Harris on the Daily Show
Wes has posted about this previously, but I wanted to give this more thought after seeing Sam Harris (introduced at the top of the show not as a philosopher but as a “professional atheist”) on the Daily Show a couple of days back. You can see the interview here. As is typical for a short interview like this, not enough Continue Reading …
Freud on Religion: A Quiz
Given that the subject of our Freud episode was Civilization and its Discontents, we were pretty quick regarding Freud’s specific points on religion, which are pretty interesting in themselves, in that his view is for practical purposes very much in line with the modern scientism of someone like Dawkins but acknowledges elements of Kantian agnosticism. For a refresher, here’s a Continue Reading …
The Amazing Mr. Tallis: On Atheism, Free Will, and Everything Else
(Watch on YouTube). I first became familiar with Raymond Tallis a few months ago, when I was exploring my fury at post-Saussurean thinkers such as Lacan and Derrida. I saw a reference somewhere to a book called Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory. After finding a copy – hard to find at a reasonable price even online – Continue Reading …
Mind Video #4: Colin McGinn
Here’s a guy that Wes brought up to me as being a somewhat extreme case in terms of anti-scientism. Whereas Churchland approaches the problem of consciousness from a scientific perspective, Colin McGinn (who must be in the witness protection program based on how darkly this is filmed) is a proclaimed “mysterian,” saying that consciousness just can’t be understood: There are Continue Reading …
Fodor, Darwin, and the Philosophy of Science
I had been looking forward to Jerry Fodor’s What Darwin Got Wrong (co-authored with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini), not because I have anything against Darwin but because Fodor is a superb writer, the well-respected cognitive scientist who “laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and language of thought hypotheses,” and a worthy opponent of the idiocy of evolutionary psychologists who seem Continue Reading …