Specter of Reason

Two days after the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I found myself improvising a melancholic interpretation of Jingle Bells.  I recorded three takes before the moment passed.  The mood and style develop over the three pieces, making them seem like three unique elements of a set, and not simply three versions of the same thing.

Peter van Inwagen has written a response to Bertrand Russell's teapot argument (H/T ex-apologist ) in which he assures us that there are people who accept the following two propositions:      (1) There is no reason to believe that God exists.      (2) Any one who accepts (1) should conclude that the probability of the existence of God is essentially 0. He offers Russell's teapot argument as an example.  However, while Russell clearly accepts (1), there's no discernible evidence that Russell ever endorsed anything like (2).  In the essay which van Inwagen cites ( "Is There A God? ", Russell, 1952), Russell argues that a divine purpose is improbable (on the scientific evidence) and thus that there is no reason to believe in a God.  He deduces the latter from the former, not the former from the latter.  Furthermore, his teapot argument is offered to a different purpose altogether. Here is what Russell writes, and what van Inwa...

A recent article in The New York Times by Professor Richard A. Friedman, M.D., entitled, " In Gun Debate, A Misguided Focus on Mental Illness ," is a bit of a hot item.  I want to agree with Friedman.  I support the fight for gun control.  (If the Second Ammendment really means that all citizens have the right to privately own guns--and I don't think it does--then I think the Second Ammendment needs to be ammended.)  But Friedman's piece is a terribly flawed, confused and misleading piece of work.  Just from the point of view of argumentative integrity, it's bad. Part of the problem is that I can't even be sure about Friedman's point of view.  I want to be charitable, and suppose that his main point is something like this:  Americans shouldn't let the discourse on mental illness distract us from the need for stricter gun control laws.  If that is his main point, then I completely agree.  Amen and all that. I'll assume that was his m...

That's the title of a recent paper I just read by Torin Alter and Yujin Nagasawa (Journal of Consciousness Studies  19, pp. 67-95; H/T ex-apologist ).  It's an interesting and mostly very clear paper, at least for me, who has not read most of the source material they are discussing.  (They're primarily drawing on Chalmers, Stoljar and Pereboom.) I was most surprised (and pleased) to see that Chalmers has made a significant qualification about the implications of the Knowledge and Conceivability Arguments.  I used to think he believed those arguments entailed the falsity of physicalism.  However, Chalmers now claims that they only entail the following disjunction:  Either physicalism is false or Russellian Monism is true.  Since there can be varieties of physicalism which are compatible with Russellian Monism, then Chalmers must be open to the possibility of physicalism. Chalmers apparently accepts (or perhaps only strongly leans towards) a variety...

I still haven't had a chance to look at Bruce Waller's book, Against Moral Responsibility   (2011) , but I've been reading about it and related topics in my spare time a bit over the past several days.  One reader, David Duffy, was kind enough to bring one of Waller's papers to my attention.  It's called "Empirical Free Will and the Ethics of Moral Responsibility"(2003).  In it, Waller claims that moral responsibility and free will are either conceptually wedded by definition (in which case, he says, we only get confusion) or there is some synthetic (empirical) connection between them.  He then argues that there is no such empirical connection. I question the claim that there is any confusion resulting from regarding a logical (analytic) entailment between moral responsibility and free will.  Unfortunately, Waller does not support his assertion here, though perhaps he addresses the issue in his more recent book.  I think the only conceptual confusion...

As I mentioned in a recent post , I'm not aware of any satisfactory arguments against Kant's demonstration that the freedom of the will can neither be proved nor disproved by pure reason.  Kant puts forward that argument in his Critique of Pure Reason .  Yet, in his Critique of Practical Reason , he makes a pragmatic argument for belief in free will: We need to believe in free will because it is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Kant's arguments are not just about free will.  They're also about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.  Yet, these days, the latter two are not seen as practically required for morality.  We can have moral responsibility without eternal souls or Divine judgment.  But can we have it without free will? Kant was a deontologist--he believed that morality requires duty and dignity, and not just behavior calculated to maximize some quantity of happiness, pleasure or goodness.  Yet, even those pursu...

I caught Skyfall last weekend and posted this mini-review on my Facebook wall: In some ways, it's excellent. Javier Bardem is unsurprisingly phenomenal. The music is very good, sometimes excellent. In other ways, it's predictably silly (the dialogue and action sequences are often well-crafted, but sometimes ridiculous). The plot is very sophisticated and convincing, and it works as an exploration of Bond himself, even though there are some pretty big holes. Nothing devastating, though. What bothers me, surprisingly, is Bond's relationship with women. Bond has always been promiscuous, but in this one he seems capable of very sincere and passionate intimacy, but without any emotional attachment at all. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I was seriously offended by the way the film depicted his relationship with women. Again, I know he's always slept around, but was it always this bad? (Maybe you need to see the film to answer that question.) Anyway, that point aside, ...