Reading Time: 9 minutes I am going to explain to you why species do not exist and in some sense there is no such thing as speciation in evolutionary biology. This will involve philosophy, sand dunes, voting, colours and fossils. Amongst other things. The Sorites Paradox My favourite philosophical thought experiment, if you can call it that, and as […]
realism
Posted inPhilosophy
Quote of the Day: NathairNimheil on Abortion and Personhood
Reading Time: 2 minutes In a rapidly expanding comment thread on SJWs and the regressive left, a debate with a religious type has developed concerning abortion. Here is a great comment by NathairNimheil: Like you holding an *arbitrary* position of what constitutes “personhood”. So my definition of personhood, which you have never even heard, is arbitrary? You reading minds now? […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Sean Carroll’s Poetic Naturalism
Reading Time: 3 minutes I have just started reading Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, which is shaping up to be a great book. I would like to just talk about this excerpt (Location 345, Kindle): The strategy I’m advocating here can be called poetic naturalism. The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, […]
Posted inPhilosophy
The Philosophy 101 Factfile – Plato
Reading Time: 5 minutes In doing the philpapers inspired Philosophy 101 series (most recent one found here), touching on the questions asked in the largest ever survey of philosophers, I thought I would give some nice, basic factfiles explaining what some of the key philosophers have brought to the philosophical table. We hear so much about Aristotle, Plato, Hume and Descartes, […]
Posted inGeneral
The Kalam Cosmological Argument and William Lane Craig #2 (revisited)
Reading Time: 9 minutes I am soon to release a book on the Kalam Cosmological Argument which has been long in the pipeline, but is finally ready, short of a foreword. As a result of its imminent creation (er, out of something!), let me remind you of an old couple of posts that deal with a major set of […]
Posted inEvolution, Philosophy
My favourite nominalism / evolution image
Reading Time: < 1 minute I am a conceptual nominalist, which I explain to some extent here. One of my favourite images to explain this is below. Also good for explaining the species problem, which reflects or exemplifies the nominalism/realism debate.
Posted inPhilosophy, Science
Abortion and Personhood
Reading Time: < 1 minute I have made sticky (sent to the top of the blog post list) the post Andreas Schueler wrote about the biological aspects of personhood, life and thus the ramifications on views on abortion. The post is excellent and reflects issues with nominalism and realism: how we attach abstract, conceptual labels to real, material things. And […]
Posted inPhilosophy
The “I”, personhood and abstract objects
Reading Time: 7 minutes I have talked about abstract objects many times before, such as here. It is a fundamental area to almost everything in philosophy and is not debated nearly enough. We had a Tippling Philosophers’ debate in the pub last night about the ‘I’ and personhood, which came down to whether they really existed as concepts or not. I actually deny the continuous ‘I’.
Posted inPhilosophy
Philosophy fundamentals – abstracts and abstract ideas
Reading Time: < 1 minute This subject is fundamental to much of philosophy. It underpins disciplines like moral philosophy, and so it provides the ontology of the building bricks of our reality. This video explains abstracts and why they are so vital:
Posted inPhilosophy
On Beauty
Reading Time: 2 minutes We had a Tippling Philosophers night the other night on beauty, and these are the quick notes I sent to someone who was unable to be there. Let me know what you think:
My belief is that:
Beauty is a word which all too often means “I like that”.