Human Contingency     There are two views about the existence of humans on this planet: one view says that human existence was inevitable, a natural culmination, just a matter of time; the other view says that human existence is an accident, an unpredictable anomaly, just a matter of luck (I am […]

        The Uniformity of Evil     Evil comes in many varieties. A typical list would include: genocide, murder, torture, terrorism, slavery, sadism, the sexual and physical abuse of children, slander, betrayal of trust, desecration of the sacred, disfiguring, maiming, and crippling. We might count as evil the willful destruction of great […]

  Is Psychology a Science?     The question is only as precise as the word “science”, which isn’t very precise. But I don’t propose to quibble about that word (I incline to a wide application of it); instead I will compare psychology to some established sciences and note various gaps in what psychology has […]

      Epistemology as Metaphysics     We usually teach epistemology as a separate field from metaphysics. On the one hand, there is reality, the subject matter of metaphysics, and on the other there is knowledge of reality, the subject matter of epistemology. It is sometimes said that Descartes made epistemology the foundation of […]