Philosophy & Ethics

The beggar's cup is empty. Hardly anybody cares about him. Despising side glances hurt, still hurt every time. A squirrel runs up the tree and goes for the best nut. Suddenly a calm understanding replaces the beggar’s bitterness. He walks into the mall where he usually steals, but today, he does not steal. He eats. Today, they care again, care about him, even give him respect. Today, he rejoined society. All agree on whether to punish or not is important. This comes from our fear of being innocently punished or otherwise hurt undeterred, un-revenged. R holds that the complementary issue of…

There is almost no way I’m not going to get in trouble with this one, and my name isn’t even Carlos Danger! But I’ve been asked several times by readers to comment on accusations of “Islamophobia” aimed at prominent New Atheists (henceforth, NA) — particularly Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins — and it seems time to get down to work. A few prelims, though. First, this isn’t my attempt at sitting, Q-like, in judgment of the whole shebang, rendering the final verdict on the matter. Yes, I will provide my (solicited, in this case) opinion, but that’s all it is, an opinion. Second, the reason I have…

Jennifer Saul, a philosopher at the University of Sheffield, published an article in Salon entitled  “Philosophy has a sexual harassment problem.” While there is much substance and nuance in the body of the article, I sincerely hope that Prof. Saul did not actually choose the title herself (editors often do that sort of thing), because the message it sends is anything but nuanced, and if taken at face value also not particularly constructive. Naturally, I need to be careful about writing on sexual harassment, for a variety of reasons. Well, two, actually. First, of course, I’m a white…

A common technique of activists and people who generally distrust science and want to undermine it is to clog up the discourse with sophistry, like "it depends on how you define X", or they claim that their personal belief means science is not science, but rather morality.  As an example, I am going to use attorney Wesley Smith, who writes a column about ethics for the conservative magazine National Review and works for the Discovery Institute, an organization devoted to undermining science. I've talked about attorney Smith once already and this will be the last time - beyond that,…

Time to take a break from philosophy of mind and get back to evolutionary psychology. The occasion originates from a recent post by evo psych researcher Robert Kurzban, on what he calls "creationism of the mind." There Kurzban excoriates our good old friend PZ Myers for some apparently silly criticisms he leveled at the field. Kurzban goes on commending Jerry Coyne for having recently seen the light, becoming a supporter of the field. Contra to what some of my seasoned readers may expect, this is going to be neither a defense of PZ, nor an attack on Coyne. But I doubt Kurzban is going to…

I recently examined (and found wanting) the so-called computational theory of mind, albeit in the context of a broader post about the difference between scientific theories and what I think are best referred to as philosophical accounts (such as the above mentioned computational “theory”). Defenders of strong versions of computationalism (which amounts to pretty much the same thing as strong AI) often invoke the twin concepts of computation itself and of the Church-Turing thesis to imply that computationalism is not only obviously true, but has been shown to be so by way of mathematical proof…

Readers of this blog are familiar with my criticism of some scientists or scientific practices, from evolutionary psychology to claims concerning the supernatural. But, especially given my dual background in science and philosophy, I pride myself in being an equal opportunity offender. And indeed, I have for instance chastised Alvin Plantinga for engaging in seriously flawed “philosophy” in the case of his evolutionary argument against naturalism, and have more than once sympathetically referred to James Ladyman and Don Ross’ criticism of analytic metaphysics as a form of “neo-scholasticism…

Though women work in corporations and serve at higher levels of organizations more than at any time in world history, sociologists note that they still lag behind men in one high-profile way; fraud. Obviously cultural critics can argue that women are being left behind in opportunities to commit fraud because they do not have equal numbers at the highest levels, but that is a self-correcting problem over time. Regardless of the gender landscape, the sociologists who examined a database of recent corporate frauds found that women typically were not part of the conspiracy. When women did play a…

Steven Pinker has written a long essay in The New Republic embracing scientism. That's really too bad, because this way Pinker joins a disturbingly long list of scientists (and a few philosophers) who confuse a defense of good science with a knee-jerk reaction against sound criticism of science. [For a good, if partial, response to Pinker from the Left look here; for a far less convincing one, from the Right, look here.] Pinker begins awfully, waxing poetic about how the Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment were all scientists, and in particular, cognitive neuroscientists, evolutionary…

As is well known to readers of this blog, I do not have much sympathy for philosophers like Alvin Plantinga. That’s not because the guy’s not smart (he certainly is), nor because he hasn’t published interesting philosophical arguments (he certainly has). But people like Plantinga still stride what should by now be an impossibly uncomfortable divide and ever widening gap between serious philosophy and theology. Not to put too fine a point on it, Plantinga is engaging in what Ladyman and Ross referred to as “neo-scholasticism” (not a compliment), the sort of philosophy that was perfectly…