Philosophy
jstemwedel | June 16, 2006Younger offspring offers a way to distinguish dreaming from conscious experience:
I thought I was really awake, so I reached up to touch a cloud, but instead of feeling fuzzy like a cloud would feel, it was like touching an empty space. So that's how you can tell if you're dreaming, if you touch the clouds and they feel like empty space.
The child hasn't read Descartes yet, but we've got all summer.
mixingmemory | June 16, 2006A few weeks ago, I wrote a post that was pretty critical of the current state of Experimental Philosophy. In the post, I focused on the work of Joshua Knobe, not because his work is the worst Experimental Philosophy has to offer, but because it is, in my mind, the best by far. Yesterday on the Experimental Philosophy blog, David Pizarro linked to a manuscript he's writing with Knobe and Paul Bloom that demonstrates quite well why I think this, and furthermore provides a very good example of what Experimental Philosophy can be when it closely aligns itself with scientific psychology.
The…
hrynyshyn | June 13, 2006How do you rank on the Scale of Doubt?
Jennifer Michael Hecht, who teaches at Nassau Community College in New York, has come up with one of those clever little web quizzes to accompany her book Doubt: A History.
First, take the quiz.
If you think she might know what she's talking about, and have an hour to kill, you can download a podcast of last night's edition of "Speaking of Faith," a weekly radio program heard on NPR stations, which features lots of Prof. Hecht's thoughts on the importance of doubt, not just to the intellectual development of western thought, but to religion as well.
jstemwedel | June 11, 2006This post, originally posted 8 January 2006 on the old site, responds to an email I got after the last post. Given John's recent post on Pro-Test, the questions are still timely.
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I received an email from a reader in response to my last post on PETA's exposing of problems with the treatment of research animals at UNC. The reader pointed me to the website of an organization concerned with the treatment of lab animals in the Research Triangle, www.serat-nc.org. And, she wrote the following:
Some people may think that PETA is extreme. However, the true "extreme" is what happens to…
hrynyshyn | June 9, 2006For my inaugural Sb post, a little bit of culture.
My first reaction to the National Review's bizarre list of the top 50 allegedly conservative rock and roll songs was incredulity, so misunderstood and misrepresented were the selections that made the list. But after trying to come up with my own list of examples celebrating science and reason, I realized why it was necessary to play fast and loose with the qualifying criteria.
Not that I would stoop that low, of course. For the past week, I've been scouring our not insubstantial CD collection and web-based lyric databases for signs that at…
neurotopia | June 9, 2006...you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sittin' in your little room
--The White Stripes
Welcome to the second incarnation of Neurotopia! The old incarnation can be found here, although lately it has just been a collection of posts where I complain about how Blogger stinks. But no more! Now I'm here on this slick new platform! The SEED overlords pulled a mean trick on me: they set up the new blog launch mere hours before I'm supposed to hit the road and celebrate my 8th anniversary by accompanying Mrs. Evil Monkey to Fallingwater for the weekend.…
jstemwedel | June 7, 2006One of the first things that happens when you get a faculty mailbox in a philosophy department is that unsolicited items start appearing in it. There are the late student papers, the book catalogs, the religious tracts -- and occasionally, actual books that, it is hoped, you will like well enough that you will exhort all your students to buy them (perhaps by requiring them for your classes).
Today, I'm going to give you my review of two little books that appeared in my faculty mailbox, both from The Foundation for Critical Thinking. The first is The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking…
jstemwedel | June 1, 2006I must report the following, although the protagonist wants to be left out of it. (I will allow as how the protagonist has a credit card, lives in my house, and isn't me, but I won't divulge any further identifying details.)
Anyway, it starts out as one of those FedEx horror stories -- far too common to merit a blog post -- but then turns into some sort of parable about common sense. I may, however, need your help in teasing out just what the moral of the story is.
So, our nameless protagonist ordered a piece of computer hardware from some company that offered free ground shipping. Said…
jrosenhouse | May 31, 2006Thanks to alejandro for directing me to his own take on Dembski's theodicy, discussed in the previous post. You can find his thoughts here. I liked his summary of the problem of evil:
This article discusses that old chestnut, the problem of evil. My own opinion on the problem of evil is simple: For someone with no previous commitment to religion that examines impartially the evidence for and against it, it is pretty damning evidence against the existence of God. For someone who is already firmly religious, it is not a contradiction to his religion; he claim can always be made that there…
jrosenhouse | May 31, 2006I have written before that I regard the problem of evil as essentially a decisive refutation of Christianity. It's not quite logically impossible to reconcile an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God with the sheer quantity of evil and suffering in the world, but it's pretty close. So when William Dembski posted a 48-page essay entitled "Christian Theodicy in Light of Genesis and Modern Science," I was intrigued. The word “theodicy,” pronounced to sound like a certain epic poem by Homer, generally refers to the problem of reconciling the existence of God with the existence of evil.
The problem of…
jrosenhouse | May 24, 2006Over at Telic Thoughts, macht has posted this reply to some of my earlier posts on the nature of science. I believe he is still missing most of the important points. But in the interest of making this into something constructive I will eschew a point-by-point rebuttal. Instead let me emphasize what I believe the key points to be, and clarify some things that may have been left unclear in some of my earlier posts.
First, science is not something that exists “out there,” with properties and characteristics that we come to know by experiment and hard work. Rather, science is a human…
jstemwedel | April 4, 2006I told you it was coming ...
The UConn philosophy graduate students have launched a new group blog, named "What is it like to be a blog?"
Procrastination (which is an essential part of the graduate school experience) may yield some interesting philosophical reading for the rest of us.
jstemwedel | March 25, 2006My university had events on campus today for newly admitted students. My department tapped me (and two of our fabulous philosophy students) to man the Philosophy Department table at the College of Humanities and Arts open house.
Hundreds of admitted students -- many with their parents -- milling around in a room with such enticing major departments as English & Comparative Literature, Art & Design, Music & Dance (yes, the cool ones have ampersands), and we were supposed to sell Philosophy.
We opted for brazenness, and wrote in big letters on the white-board/easel we had brought…
jstemwedel | March 23, 2006Do people routinely assert that the tools and activities of your field are utterly worthless in real life? Do they go so far as to say that what you're doing is worse than nothing, because it distracts from the real tasks that need tackling?
Or is it mostly just philosophers who get this kind of reaction?
While there are some issues on which some philosophers focus that don't have what I'd describe as wide appeal (problem of universals, anyone?), I'd like to think at least some of what philosophy has to offer is portable to all manner of questions and thus could be useful in real life. But…
jstemwedel | March 22, 2006You may as well know that I'm as susceptible to peer pressure as the next geek.
This means that even though I myself was dismissive about the prospects for creating an accurate and/or useful taxonomy of my people in the tribe of science, now that my sibling ScienceBloggers are soliciting information to flesh out the taxonomies of anthropologists, physicists, and biologists, I don't want to be left out.
Of course, in the World of Geekdom, I have dual citizenship. This means I'm appealing to you to contribute to the wall chart of identifying features for various sorts of chemists or…
jstemwedel | March 1, 2006No, not for me (although some comments elsewhere in the ScienceBlogs galaxy have been rather more anti-philosophy than pro); for John Perry and Ken Taylor, the guys who do Philosophy Talk on public radio (and on streaming audio on your computer).
They've been doing the show for more than two years now. However, the seed money that got them started is dwindling. Here's their bleg:
When we started, many people in radio took our ideas with a very large grain of salt. "Philosophy on the Radio?" they asked incredulously. "Two academics as co-hosts? A stream of professional thinkers,…