I would like to recommend two books I just read: Christopher Janaway on Schopenhauer and Patrick Gardiner on Kierkegaard, both in the Oxford series of Very Short introductions. Both are very well written, clear and informative, as well as off the beaten track. I was particularly interested to read Gardiner’s book as I knew him […]
I just watched Goffin beat Federer in the end of year tournament in London. It’s amazing that Roger can play this well at 36, but David simply outplayed him. Roger’s smile across the net at the end was classic. I’m 67 and I play a guy who is 29–the number one player in Cuba in […]
Something different. Food and Philosophy Are there any hitherto undiscovered branches of philosophy? There must have been a time when no branches of philosophy had been discovered, back in prehistory, and then gradually the field formed and spread itself. Now we have numerous fields and sub-fields of philosophical enquiry, […]
I thought this was a good and useful review (from Metapsychology 2012). The Meaning of Disgust by Colin McGinn Oxford University Press, 2011 Review by Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D., Mar 6th 2012 (Volume 16, Issue 10) Colin McGinn’s recent new book, The Meaning of Disgust, sports a tempting enough title to lure the curious reader […]
Is there any evidence of Jesus’ divinity in the passages known as the Sermon on the Mount? If his moral teachings reflected some kind of divine infallibility, we would expect these teachings to express the most advanced morality possible. We would expect Jesus to be a moral sage. And if we found such an […]
Explanations of Life Suppose we encounter life forms on another planet unrelated to ours and possibly quite unlike ours. Still, there is evident adaptive complexity, so that the laws of physics and chance cannot explain what we observe. What possible explanation might be given for this complexity? How might […]
Plurality and the Big Bang It is said that the big bang created space and time—they did not exist beforehand. Thus something existed (a “singularity”) before space and time existed; and it was some sort of empirical particular not an abstract entity. It is generally conceived as superhot […]
Why Did Sex Evolve? Some reproduction is sexual and some is asexual. There is no biological necessity about sexual reproduction, despite its prevalence. How could there be any such necessity, given that the basic principle of evolutionary biology is just that organisms are designed to maximize the presence of their genes in later […]
Injustice Injustice directed towards an individual creates a specific psychological response. This response includes anger at the perpetrator, moral indignation, resentment, a sense of futility, a desire for revenge, disillusionment, and general malaise. It can shape a person’s entire life, and destroy his or her wellbeing permanently. The injustice can be of two […]
Evolutionary Causation Evolution is a causal process. But it is a causal process unlike any other. It is a causal process in which the effect vastly exceeds the cause, and indeed (in a loose sense) contradicts the cause. The most obvious point is that the effect is much more complex than the cause: […]