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, …
Academician Abdusalam A. Guseinov on pacificism and the perspective of the infinite beginning. The idea of nonviolence entered into the cycle of Russian ethics on the wave of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. It struck a chord among society at large. Since that period, the attitude to pacifist ideas has changed considerably. This attitude can now be …
Kelvin McQueen asks whether minds could directly influence physical reality. It is widely acknowledged that there is a problem of explaining how subjective, conscious experience could arise out of physical matter. The focus is generally on the matter-to-consciousness direction. But there is an equally puzzling problem going in the other direction. What causal effects does …
Jonathan Beever explores the light and dark sides of interconnectedness. As a result of the explosive growth of ecological thinking, the idea of interdependence is all around us. Fundamental to the idea is the view that, in some way, ‘we’re all connected’ – to each other, to other organisms, and to our environments, both analog …
Jean-Paul Sartre at 100 By Any Means Necessary? Ian Birchall on a moral problem for Sartre. When Jean-Paul Sartre published Being and Nothingness in 1943, his conclusion promised a sequel. This was perhaps not the most enticing prospect for a reader who had just finished ploughing through 700 impenetrable pages. But in fact the book …
Rohan Somji looks at the consequences of thinking for three antique thinkers. A philosopher is someone who sees deep questions where others find things straightforward. This I call ‘problematising’, or, as Plato called it, ‘the search for essence’. In any case, it instills a sense of mystery, awe and wonder. Now, there are numerous ways …
The Nobel Prize in physics this year has been awarded “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”. To understand what this means, and why this work is important, we need to understand how these experiments settled a long-running debate among physicists. And a key player in that debate …
How philosophy turned into physics – and reality turned into information Read More »
Socrates was notoriously annoying. He was likened to a gadfly buzzing around while one is trying to sleep. The Oracle of Delphi declared him the wisest of all human beings. His life and death would go on to shape the history of Western thought. And yet he proclaimed to know nothing. The genius of Socrates …
Chris Wright ponders Plato’s masterplan. One of the purposes of Plato’s Republic is to put forth a conception of the ‘just state’. Plato describes how such a state would be organized, who would govern it, what sort of education the children would have, and so on. He goes into great detail, laying out ideas that may at times …
Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) was a transformative figure in modern Western philosophy due to his ground-breaking work in metaphysics and ethics.He was one of the most influential philosophers of the 18th century, and his work in metaphysics and ethics have had a lasting impact to this day. One of Kant’s greatest contributions to philosophy was his …