philopapers

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 […]

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

Ching-Hung Woo says freedom is compatible with choices being determined. We commonly think it obvious that a person facing multiple alternatives can choose any of them, and that the outcome is decided by free will at the moment of decision, rather than being already determined by earlier causes. All the events in the world, however, obey

Are we free or are our actions determined by the laws of physics? And how much free will do we actually want? These questions have troubled philosophers for millennia – and there are still no perfect answers. But it turns out that a character from a children’s TV series can provide a clue. Thomas the Tank Engine, despite

Stuart Hannabuss journeys into the human condition with Søren Kierkegaard. We tend to think of faith as a matter of personal choice. It is very much up to you, we say, wishing to give other people the space to live their lives their way. We might think of ourselves all on a journey through life, growing

Scientists have discovered that our universe displays an incredible degree of fine-tuning. This fine-tuning, found in the laws of physics, makes it possible for life to exist. And it is so improbable that it strongly implies God designed the universe. Unsurprisingly, atheists reject this conclusion and their best alternative explanation is to claim that a

 When Charles Darwin published his landmark book The Origin of Species, he recognized that the burden of proof was on him if he was going to explain the evident design of biological life apart from the actions of an intelligent mind. And this he sought to do by providing an explanation for how species originated

The notion of hell is not a popular idea. Those who regard themselves as scientifically informed and morally enlightened, usually regard hell as something that belongs to the superstitious and religious past. For these atheists, agnostics, and “progressive Christians” it might be understandable how people in the Medieval Era could succumb to such nonsense, but