Specter of Reason

A lot of people conflate philosophy and religion.  In their devotion to science and rationality, they criticize both philosophy and religion as useless nonsense.  One of the most common criticisms of philosophy is that virtually no substantial progress has ever been made on any issue of philosophical importance.  Another common criticism is that philosophical problems have no discernible consequences for our lives:  It doesn't matter how you respond to them, whether you ignore them or whatever, because they are figments of our imagination and of no practical importance.  On these grounds, it is believed that philosophy and religion are more or less the same.  Sure, philosophers might sometimes give us important tools or insights, just as religious leaders might sometimes give us important moral insights or works of art.  But these came despite the philosophical or religious devotion, and not because of it.  At least, that's what a lot of people be...

As Inside Higher Ed reports, there's been a lot of discussion of Assistant Professor Eric Hedin and Ball State University's approval of his Physics and Astronomy courses, "Inquiries in Physical Sciences," "The Boundaries of Science" and "The Universe and You."  (Jerry Coyne has written most extensively about them  here ,  here  and, most recently,  here ).  The courses apparently share the same basic  syllabus , and if you read it you can see that Hedin has tailored the courses to promote the Intelligent Design movement (which is known for its intimate political and intellectual connections to Christian apologetics).  It is hard to imagine that these courses fairly represent the methods, values, findings and competences of contemporary science. Many critics of Intelligent Design say it shouldn't be subject to discussion in science classes.  I disagree.  I think a science class is the perfect place to debunk ID propaganda.  And i...

In my last post, in response to Timothy Williamson's hesitations regarding naturalism, I rambled a bit about possible difficulties in sorting out a naturalistic understanding of mathematical truth.  I was reflecting on the problem of universality:  Logical and mathematical truths are not truths about the actual world, but extend to all possible worlds.  That would seem to be very hard to explain, if logical and mathematical truths are limited by local factors--factors which ground them in facts about our world.  Today I have worked out a possible solution. The first step is to distinguish between two types of possibility:  logical possibility and physical possibility.  Another way of putting it is that possibility can be relative to a logical framework or a physical one.  When we say that something is physically possible, we mean it cannot be ruled out by the laws of physics (or, if you don't want to favor physics above other sciences, we can just sa...

In a 2011 Stone column, Timothy Williamson writes : "One challenge to naturalism is to find a place for mathematics. Natural sciences rely on it, but should we count it a science in its own right? If we do, then the description of scientific method just given is wrong, for it does not fit the science of mathematics, which proves its results by pure reasoning, rather than the hypothetico-deductive method. Although a few naturalists, such as W.V. Quine, argued that the real evidence in favor of mathematics comes from its applications in the natural sciences, so indirectly from observation and experiment, that view does not fit the way the subject actually develops. When mathematicians assess a proposed new axiom, they look at its consequences within mathematics, not outside. On the other hand, if we do not count pure mathematics a science, we thereby exclude mathematical proof by itself from the scientific method, and so discredit naturalism. For naturalism privileges the scienti...

I may be the only person I know who thinks  Iron Man 2  is the best of the three Iron Man movies. I'm not much of a fan of any of them. I probably enjoyed the second the most because I went into it with very low expectations. I had been disappointed by the first  Iron Man , which strained credulity beyond the breaking point, and even thematically seemed utterly confused. So I went into  Iron Man 3  with very low expectations, too. Given that, I was surprised at how disappointing it still was.  To put it bluntly, I see no reason to recommend this movie unless you're devoted to the franchise or just can't live without a superhero fix, no matter how unfulfilling. It's passable as blockbuster entertainment, but that's about it, and that's not saying much.  The biggest problem I had was that the charisma and charm that carried the first two movies is almost nowhere to be found in this installment. That made the rest of the film's weaknesses that much graver...