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Episode 168: Darwin’s “Origin of Species” (Part Two)

July 24, 2017 by Mark Linsenmayer 14 Comments

More on Darwin's famous book. Why does it matter for philosophy, beyond providing an alternative to intelligent design? Is it really anti-religious? How can well tell if it's really a scientific theory? Talking about a species evolving trait X to enable survival sounds teleological; is it really, and is that bad? Why would the mind develop through natural  Continue Reading …

Episode 168: Darwin’s “Origin of Species” (Part One)

July 17, 2017 by Mark Linsenmayer 10 Comments

On Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859 with the final edition published in 1872), ch. 1–4, 6, and 14. What are the philosophical ramifications of Darwin's theory of evolution? Our last reading ended with David Hume saying that given the order of nature, the idea of a  Continue Reading …

Ep. 168: Darwin’s “Origin of Species” (Citizen Edition)

July 16, 2017 by Mark Linsenmayer 5 Comments

On Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859 with the final edition published in 1872), ch. 1–4, 6, and 14. What are the philosophical ramifications of Darwin's theory of evolution? Our last reading ended with David Hume saying that given the order of nature, the idea of a  Continue Reading …

Evolution is Rigged! A Review of Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos”

February 7, 2013 by Wes Alwan 28 Comments

Subscribe to more of my writing at https://www.wesalwan.com Follow me on Twitter 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  Continue Reading …

An Objection to Sharon Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma”

January 29, 2013 by Wes Alwan 13 Comments

I’ve been stalled for some time now in my attempt to write a review of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. My primary stumbling block has been his reliance in one section on Sharon Street’s “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”, which attempts to show that natural selection (in its current form) is not compatible with moral realism. Where Street takes this  Continue Reading …

Naturalism & Philosophical Thinking

June 17, 2011 by Tom McDonald 20 Comments

[editor's note: Here's our guest blogger Tom McDonald with a bit of original philosophizing. You can read more like this on his blog zuhanden.com. -ML] I want to pose some general questions to all readers, but especially to those scientifically inclined and favorable to a naturalistic worldview. The questions are about the naturalistic worldview that is presently normative  Continue Reading …

Naturalism & Philosophical Thinking

June 17, 2011 by Tom McDonald 20 Comments

[editor's note: Here's our guest blogger Tom McDonald with a bit of original philosophizing. You can read more like this on his blog zuhanden.com. -ML] I want to pose some general questions to all readers, but especially to those scientifically inclined and favorable to a naturalistic worldview. The questions are about the naturalistic worldview that is presently normative but  Continue Reading …

Thump Thump or Pump Pump? Fodor’s Confusion Explained.

March 20, 2010 by Wes Alwan 5 Comments

This is an animated but polite discussion between Jerry Fodor and Elliott Sober -- very interesting, and I think I understand Fodor a little better now (i.e., motivates what I believe to be his error --- other than the fact that he's worried about problematic teleological notions like function being necessary to natural selection as a theory). And I do believe I've come up with  Continue Reading …

Fodor, Darwin, and the Philosophy of Science

March 18, 2010 by Wes Alwan 2 Comments

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  Continue Reading …

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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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