Reality and the meaning of life
I will argue that reality and truth play central roles in determining whether a person’s life is meaningful. The main thought is that a life of merely subjective happiness and pleasure — e.g. a life under Nozick’s well-known Pleasure Machine — is not a meaningful life. It is not easy to argue for this view. I will explore some intuitions that . . .
Zen and the art of philosophy maintenance
One may characterize philosophy as critical thinking applied to a certain set of philosophical problems. But this is prey to the following objection: This characterization is wrong because it leaves Zen and other forms of non-critical approaches to philosophy out of the picture. The critical, argumentative way of doing philosophy applies only . . .
The word 'science' should be banned
Well, I got your attention, right? Why on earth would one want to ban a word like ‘science’? I do not seriously mean to ban that word, although it sure would help people to think more clearly about science-related matters.
The trouble is the way people use ‘science’, to mean almost exclusively physics. Even other empirical subjects, . . .
Does science need philosophy?
Feynman is credited as saying that “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds” (I was unable to check the source of this widely quoted sentence. It may be apocryphal; see Kitcher 1998). So perhaps no other branch of philosophy — ethics, logic or the philosophy of language — is of any interest to . . .
God and entailment
In his Warranted Christian Belief, Alvin Plantinga writes (p. 332, note 4):
if God is a necessary being, as most of the Christian tradition has thought, then his existence is entailed by the existence of my experience, because entailed by the existence of anything at all.
What is at stake here is that any necessary . . .
Obscurantism today
Why it lingers, and what can we do about it
Steven Pinker tries to show why science is not our enemy in an interesting article published in The New Republic. The fact is that there is too much science-bashing in the humanities nowadays, this attitude being detrimental to the very social and political aims many professors of humanities profess to profess. Some of us take science, . . .
