The most excellent Rob Rupert has made his latest paper freely available. Abstract Philosophers of mind commonly draw a distinction between the personal level – the distinctive realm of conscious experience and reasoned deliberation – and the subpersonal level, the domain of mindless mechanism and brute cause and effect. Moreover, they tend to view cognitive…
Richard Marshall chats with Dan in 3:AM Magazine. Very briefly put, I think phenomenologists reject various forms of reductionism, objectivism, and scientism. They insist on foregrounding the experiential perspective, and are more interested in descriptive adequacy than in explanatory mechanisms. Central to their efforts is an attempt to characterize and understand the pre-scientific lifeworld, which…
The very excellent Paul Lewis has alerted me to a new paper of his available in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 41, Issue 5, 1 August 2017, pp. 1343–1365. Friedrich HayekHistory of Economic ThoughtPaul Lewisphilosophy of social sciencereductionismsocial ontologytony Lawson
Nicely balanced review of Dennett and Scruton’s latest books. We need both approaches. See article in Standpoint. ADAM ZEMAN Roger ScrutonconsciousnessDaniel Dennettevolutionary biologyEvolutionary PsychologyHuman natureMaterialismneural correlatesNeurophilosophyneurosciencePhilosophy of mindreductionism
Two thinkers I greatly admire are having a dust-up — well at least, Jerry Coyne has taken Richard Gunderman to task concerning his article (I’m familiar with Richard’s work on the philosophy of philanthropy and classical sense of liberality). I trust that if this spat gets energized, that it will remain civil. brain imagingdualismjerry coyneMindPhilosophy of…
Here’s an interview with Vernon Smith concerning the relationship of science to religion. I had no idea Vernon felt this way until I read his Discovery – A Memoir (which he so kindly sent me a few years back), so this interview is of no surprise. Despite Vernon’s genuine achievements the fashionably atheist philosopher would “cock a snook” at…
Check out the “odd couple’s” (I suspect a professional euphemism for looniness) freely available update Consciousness in the universe: a review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory with accompanying interview (first video). I heard Penrose speak at Imperial College around the time The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics was released. I’ve never had the…
This in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Is there a novelist today of whom we can we say, as someone said of Dostoevsky, he “felt thought”? To read Dostoevsky, as Michael Dirda pointed out, is to encounter “souls chafed and lacerated by theories.” Yes, Walker Percy Recent arguments about God or creationism are old hat, despite…
Namit Arora in a themed issue of Philosophy Now considers the complexity of consciousness and its implications for artificial intelligence. But despite the big advances in computing, AI has fallen woefully short of its ambition and hype. Instead, we have ‘expert’ systems that process predetermined inputs in specific domains, perform pattern matching and database lookups, and…
manwithoutqualities 