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...