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, …
Does free will exist? Michael Hauskeller reasons about reasons. Imagine you go to a restaurant. Looking at the menu, you discover that they serve your two favourite meals – say asparagus and spinach tart. What will you do? You may hesitate for a while, but then you will make your choice. You have to make …
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’ …
Andrew Kemle says that evolutionary forces give us the answer. One of the major discoveries in the social sciences over the past few decades has been that people have innate other-regarding preferences. This means that we generally take other people’s interests and well-being into account when making decisions, and that although socialization can affect the …
Can You Be Both A Moral Rationalist & A Moral Sentimentalist? Read More »
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 …
Paul Stearns argues against moral relativism and moral presentism. “Whatever we may say about the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree it should be done with sterilized instruments.”– G.K. Chesterton “Man is the measure of all things.”– …
Michael-John Turp asks if anyone has the authority to establish moral truth. Socrates famously got himself into trouble by persistently questioning authority. He irritated his fellow citizens so much that he ended up on trial. Eventually he accepted his sentence of execution by drinking hemlock rather than evading the law by fleeing to an easy …
Justin Bartlett explores a basic distinction between understandings of ethics. We are all concerned, to a greater or lesser degree, with ethical issues. Whether it be concerns over crime and punishment, humanitarian aid, ecological destruction, or simply the fact that your friend has broken a promise, ethical considerations seem to creep into almost all areas …
Chad Trainer on Leonardo da Vinci as a philosopher. Francis I, King of France and patron of Leonardo da Vinci, once proclaimed in a conversation with the King of Navarre and the Cardinals of Ferrara and Lorraine that nobody in the world knew more than Leonardo. As much reverence as Francis I had for Leonardo’s …
Stephen Stewart on a forgotten golden age of philosophy. Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo in the visual arts. Bruno, Machiavelli, Erasmus and Thomas More in the world of philosophy. With names like that, it is little wonder that the Renaissance, spanning some three hundred years from the 14th to the 16th centuries, is seen as a …