Stoicism proposes an ongoing discipline of deliberately withdrawing one’s desires and aversions from external matters and applying them to what lies within one’s own person. Getting this distinction right—what is in our power and what is not—turns out to be integral to understanding and practicing Stoic philosophy as a way of life.
Many Forms of Doing: A Surprising Source for Pluralism about Agency
An excerpt from Christopher Yeomans’s
The Incoherence of Michael Sandel’s Critique of Liberalism
Michael Sandel is one of America’s best-known political philosophers, and helped establish his reputation with a widely respected and widely taught book, “Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.” That’s surprising, given that its central argument is based on some very obvious errors in reasoning.
Moral Sentiments and Moral Responsibility: An Interview with David Shoemaker (Part 1)
An interview with philosopher Dave Shoemaker about his new book, Responsibility from the Margins, that discusses how our conceptions of moral responsibility depend on, or are even constituted by, our emotional reactions to the actions, omissions, and attitudes of others.
Science, Technology, and Society XIV: Ian Hacking
In “The Social Construction of What?” (1999), Ian Hacking argues that constructionist accounts of scientific theories tend to lose sight of a basic question: what, exactly, is it that’s supposed to be constructed?
Science, Technology, and Society XIII: The Sokal Hoax
In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated a hoax by submitting a nonsense article to an academic journal of postmodern studies, and subsequently deriding the journal for publishing it. The hoax was, and remains, a significant salvo in the “Science Wars.”
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 4: Imprudence?
In contrast to Jesus’s teachings on the virtue of prudence, there are also his parables that feature strong aspects of imprudence. Whereas prudence is an intellectual virtue that involves reasoning out one’s conscience, what Jesus urges in his imagery of imprudence is that we also act from sensitivity to our emotions.
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 3: Shocking Images
According to the Parable of the Dishonest Manager, in the Gospel of Luke, the Kingdom of God is like a man who makes dishonest use of his boss’s money
Science, Technology, and Society XI: Constructive Empiricism
Because many, if not most, of the things with which science has to deal cannot be directly observed, the central question of science is not “What is the truth about nature?” but “what counts as an empirically adequate explanation?”
Camus’ Great Blasphemy and the Ethics that Followed
Albert Camus often gets lumped in with twentieth-century French existentialists, a crew known for its hardline atheistic membership. But Camus was something different, something much more blasphemous: an agnostic who wouldn’t revere God even if He did exist.
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 2: Prudence
Part 1 of this series ended with my arguments that because Jesus was not a systematic philosopher, it would be helpful to elaborate his moral teachings in the framework of an ethical system, and that virtue ethics is the system best suited to this purpose, as many Christians have traditionally thought. Taking up this approach, Continue Reading …
Citizen Interview with Nicholas Humphrey, a Leading Figure in Mind and Consciousness
Having the opportunity to speak with Nicholas Humphrey was a phenomenal experience (pun intended). His accounts of discussing dreams with Francis Crick, debating the best materialist arguments with Dan Dennett, working on blindsight, describing how personhood and ethics arise out of consciousness, and positing that our minds act as artists to make us fall in love with ourselves, make for a wonderful and enlightening listen.
Epicurus’ Four Cures
The resolution to follow Epicurus is a resolution to protect one’s mind. We live in a dysfunctional consumerist society filled with anxiety and neuroses, where few people analyse their lives, most have a short attention span and are uninterested in disciplining their minds and curbing mindless desires. If philosophy is understood as the Epicureans understand it, then it becomes evident that people desperately need philosophy today.
Science, Technology and Society X: Weimar Culture and Quantum Mechanics
Because German science held such a prominent place in culture before WWI, it could not escape the fallout when the war ended in disaster. German physicists needed a way to reestablish their prestige, and this meant repudiating their prewar past in order to make room for an up-to-date theory that would not be tarnished by earlier failures.A new mania for a romantic “life philosophy,” which rejected the mechanical and mechanistic attitudes of the British in favor of an experience-based, intuitive holism became fashionable. In physics, the new model incorporated the values of “life philosophy” by rejecting causality as the principle explanatory mechanism.
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 1: Introduction
To say that Jesus was a philosopher is not to say that he was a philosopher and nothing else; he was also a religious preacher and healer. But philosophical argument is implicit in much of his teaching, especially when he is in dialogue. Moreover, his parables, as stimuli to deeper thought, are philosophical devices also.
Science, Technology and Society IX: Malthus, Darwin, and “Social Darwinism”
In a series of essays written, Robert M. Young argued that scientific theories, like all other products of the human mind, arise out of a specific social context. Theories necessarily incorporate the values and concerns of the people who create them, which are themselves expressions of their specific historical context. Therefore, if we want to understand evolution, we need to understand the history of Victorian England.
Schopenhauer’s Idealism: How Time Began with the First Eye Opening
How does Schopenhauer reconcile nature’s dependence on human minds (his idealism) with the belief that science can study the distant past before any minds existed?
Science, Technology and Society VIII: Leviathan and the Air Pump
According to Boyle, the best method in natural philosophy (and politics) was experiment and observation. Hobbes disagreed. He believed that observation could never displace deduction as a form of reasoning because observation always admitted of multiple explanations, and without rigorous definitions there was no way to decide between them. No number of experiments with air pumps could establish whether a vacuum was present or not unless Boyle could define what vacuum, air, etc., were.
Science, Technology and Society VII: On Gender and Science
Evelyn Fox Keller is a leader among a generation of feminist scholars interested in questions of gender and science. Although feminist philosophy of science is a complex and controversial field, and these scholars frequently disagree among themselves as to what changes are desirable or realistically attainable, they share a commitment to broadening the scope of science so that it does not devalue feminine perspectives as a kind of structural principle.
Science, Technology and Society VI: David Bloor and the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge
Whereas Kuhn had suggested that science might not be an entirely rational activity, and Feyerabend had drawn certain philosophical and political conclusions from a rather more strident belief, David Bloor argued for an approach that ignores the truth status of scientific theories and instead concentrates on their social context of production. Needless to say, the idea that truth claims arising out of science can be ignored at all, let alone as a systematic methodological principle, was and is controversial.
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