Peter Benson tells us how critiques of both Marx and capitalist society have evolved in France, with special reference to Jean Baudrillard and Bernard Stiegler. In 1989, when the Soviet Union imploded and its satellite states chaotically collapsed, there were those in the West who declared that communism had been not only defeated but refuted. …
Adrian Brockless on the proper way to use the words ‘thought’ and ‘consciousness’. The concept of thought is one with which people make mischief. Is thought to do with what it is like to have experiences? How can we know for sure that others think as we do? In what ways are thought and consciousness …
Paul Austin Murphy repudiates a blasé reduction of mind to matter by one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA. In Francis Crick’s 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, he wrote the following oft-quoted passage: “‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of …
Francis Crick’s Deliberately Provocative Reductionism Read More »
Brett Wilson explores personal identity with John Locke and a dodgy 3D printer. Imagine that in the distant future, while working on a recalcitrant 3D printer, you accidentally cut off your hand. For a moment you consider printing a mechanical replacement, but you are nostalgic about biology, so you rush with your severed limb to …
Massimo Pigliucci takes a brief look at the history and current schools of philosophy of mind. I have had the idea of writing this article in mind for some time now, and yet it is not entirely clear what this very sentence might mean. Is a mind distinct from ideas that somehow float inside it? …
David Wong on two ancient Chinese philosophers with very different approaches to moral reasoning. How we develop good judgment about what to do in a particular situation? In the modern Western tradition, the dominant answer to this question comes in the form of a ‘top-down’ model of moral reasoning that derives concrete judgment from general principle …
Nicola Webber asks you (and you). When we think of a person, we usually think of someone with a brain and a single unified consciousness. This view has come under fire from some philosophers who argue it’s possible for more than one person to inhabit a body – a possibility hinted at through ‘split brain’ patients, …
Norman Bacrac lets his brain do all the thinking. “Conscious will is a symptom, not a cause; its roots… are invisible to it… material”George Santayana, The Realm of Matter (1930) “A disgrace… more awful than dualism” (Ted Honderich, Philosopher – A Kind of Life, 2001, pp.247, 278); “a dreaded relic” (Daniel C. Dennett, Brainchildren, 1998, …
Toni Vogel Carey wonders whether nature loves simplicity. Webster’s Ninth gives this definition of ‘parsimony’: 1) The quality of being careful with money or resources; the quality or state of being niggardly: stinginess. 2) Economy in the use of means to an end; economy of explanation in conformity with Occam’s razor. It is the ‘explanatory’ …
Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics. Criticising one of history’s most important-ever scientists can sound like a sketch from Monty Python: “OK, but apart from breakthroughs in optics, mathematics, mechanics, explaining gravity, inventing calculus, something about trigonometry, predicting how planets move, and other stuff that we don’t understand, what has Isaac Newton …