I received this email through the website contact form the other night. It moved me.
Subject: I was always going to write this email.
Hey Jonathan,
Tag philosophy
The great comedy character for Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe has a field day with philosophy:
An occasional commenter here, Ron Murphy (ronmurp), linked to one of his pieces in another thread. It’s a really good piece, with some thought-provoking stuff on the is/ought issue in moral philosophy. See what you think and comment as usual below:
Yet another moral philosopher (another religious one) makes a hash of morality. So I wanted to get this down as a summary of my position on how morality is nothing more than opinion elevated to nobility; a common man made special by simply calling him a lord or a bishop.
This is always an interesting question because it challenges your own worldview, assuming you are an atheist. It’s the classic line of questioning you get when you are in an interview:
“So, Mr Pearce, what do you think your biggest weakness is?”
Of course, I have no weakness…
The flagship BBC religion, ethics and politics show, The Big Questions, this week featured a whole hour on free will. I was asked to attend ass a front row guest on the subject in York for the pre-recorded show last Sunday. Here are my thoughts on the actual content of what was discussed.
Over on another post and thread, D Rizdek is doing a fantastically erudite job of mounting a solid case for naturalism. Here are two of his quotes from that thread which are well worth replicating – indented quotes belong to whom he is debating:
Unfortunately the debate is asking “Does science embrace all in the universe?” In other words what is the status of scientism?
and
I certainly don’t consider all of what I am to be “in science”
These tell me two things.
Some of the writers here at SIN have contributed to an anthology called 13 Reasons to Doubt, with chapters ranging over many aspects of skepticism. Here s the description:
Here is a broad selection of claims and quotes from the Catholic Encyclopedia article “The Nature and Attributes of God” compiled by my friend Julian Haydon:
God is infinitely perfect
He is infinitely good, intelligent, wise, just, holy, etc
no Theist of average intelligence ever thinks of understanding literally the metaphors he applies, or hears applied by others, to God
Thus God is said to see or hear, as if He had physical organs, or to be angry or sorry, as if subject to human passions
As part of my introductory series which has looked at different philosophers and the philosophical questions from the 2009 philpapers survey, I am going to look at qualia, as asked by a friend on facebook.
I’m not sure about anyone else, but I find myself aloof at times. It’s easy for me to become so bogged down in this world of abstract thinking that I forget that most people don’t care whether such things as metaphysical nihilism or modal realism are descriptive of reality or not. And I think that I, like many people, need a creative release.
I was listening to a Reasonable Doubts podcast from a few years ago, and it was, as ever, cracking. This one was about consciousness, its hard problem, dualism, and how it, and neuroscience, are being co-opted as a philosophical area to argue for the “God of the Gaps” style argument in the same vein as evolution in the creationist and intelligent design movements.
I, as you may well know, contribute to the Skepticule podcast by recording a counter-apologetics segment for them, Pearced Off.…
Here is an email on the back channels from fellow SINner David, who runs a great blog at SIN at…
Causality. It is a funny thing. Or not so funny.
A few years back, I took my class, as a teacher, on a class trip to the Historic Dockyard in the naval city of Portsmouth, UK. My school is some 45 minutes walk and a short ferry ride from there. With the cost of coaches, it is important to be able to walk to such places to keep the costs down for parents.
This article in Mother Jones builds on work which I, myself, talked about in my book Free Will? It is certainly the case that we can predict political leanings using disgust sensitivity. As I state in my book (p. 153-4):
So having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions were. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will go down the questions in order. I will explain the terms and the question, whilst also giving some context within the discipline of Philosophy of Religion.
Sean Carroll, who will soon be debating with William Lane Craig, I believe, some time ago organised a conference of…
Another thing I wanted to add was the idea that the mental, the experiential, supervenes on the physical. This means that the physical in some way defines and is necessary for the mental.
This is becoming more and more evident. Let me exemplify:
How much do you love your mother?
My twins had their birthday the other day so we went to Paulton’s Park, a local theme park for young children with a section called Peppa Pig World, and my boys love Peppa Pig.
All sounds rather unphilosophical so far. But that was until we pulled off the M27 and hit the short dual carriageway to a roundabout which led to a single carriage road to the park itself. The drive would normally take somewhere in the region of a minute. Or less. Apart from it took us an hour. One whole hour of my life I will never get back.
Last night’s meeting at Portsmouth Skeptics int he Pub was great fun. Rather than have a single speaker, previous speakers…