Reading Time: 7 minutes A new Tippling Philosopher has recently joined our group and come to the last few meetings. I was discussing free will with him in the pub, and he seemed to fail to understand how the Principle of Alternative Possibilities worked, and how the incoherence of free will seems insurmountable. Here is the last email I sent to the group to try to explain.
Philosophy
Posted inEthics and Morality, Philosophy
Peppa Pig World, traffic, and the philosophy of free riding
Reading Time: 3 minutes 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.
Posted inPhilosophy
Deconstructing the Popular Use of Occam’s Razor – An Argument Against Naturalism?
Reading Time: 7 minutes A chap called Lothar’s Son from Germany has contacted me to offer an argument against naturalism which he has posted on his blog. His blog, lotharlorraine, hosts the piece which can be found here. Please feel free to comment there as well as here. Thanks for LS for contacting me! Here is his argument, with kind permission:
Posted inBooks, Philosophy
Stephen Law responds to Randal Rauser on Believing Bullshit
Reading Time: < 1 minute This is from Stephen’s SIN post. i have posted an excerpt. Check out the rest here.
A while ago the well-known Christian apologist and blogger Randal Rauser posted a very long review of my book Believing Bullshit on his blog. You can find Rauser’s review here.
While making a few nice comments about the book, Rauser was generally very negative. He posted the same review on the amazon page for my book and gave the book just two stars.
Posted inPhilosophy
Philosophy table well-received
Reading Time: < 1 minute Last night’s meeting at Portsmouth Skeptics int he Pub was great fun. Rather than have a single speaker, previous speakers were asked to come back and host tables on whatever subjects they deemed fit and interesting. I hosted a philosophy table and primed people with a few questions on a sheet: What makes you you? […]
Posted inPhilosophy, Psychology
Philosophy, nationalism, in-group / out-group and the British Lions rugby team….
Reading Time: 4 minutes The longer I have been pursuing philosophy, the more liberal I have become and the less nationalistic. By this i/ mean that I have recognised that my nationality if a mixture of several components over which I have no control:
Posted inPhilosophy
Guest Post by Neil Webber – The Causality Paradox
Reading Time: 6 minutes Here is another guest post. The last one by The Thinker has had a thread which has exploded. This one is interesting, and one very similar to my lines of argumentation. Neil is a friend of mine with whom I lost contact. We played ultimate frisbee together at uni, and formed a team with other […]
Posted inEnvironment, Ethics and Morality, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology
Political Libertarianism, Science Denialism, Philosophy and the likes of James Delingpole
Reading Time: 13 minutes I am going to look at political libertarianism in this post in the context of morality, ethics and philosophy. This has been brought on by the Any Questions live radio programme on BBC Radio 4 the other day from the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales which featured right-wing Conservative, Telegraph blogger, Climate Change (AGW) denier James Delingpole, Secretary of State for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs, Owen Paterson MP (Conservative), left wing Labour politician Peter Hain MP, Leader of Plaid Cymru (The Welsh national party), socialist and republican Leanne Wood.
Posted inGeneral, Philosophy
Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #4: Analytic-synthetic distinction
Reading Time: 6 minutes 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 […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Libertarian Free Will Defeats the Kalam Cosmological Argument
Reading Time: 4 minutes I was posting on Randal Rauser’s blog recently and made a throw away comment about the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) and libertarian free will. It is an argument which have meant to spell out for some time and so I guess this is as good a time as any.