On Socrates the insufferable
I am trying to make a second go-around the whole audiobook thing. For whatever reason, I’m not very good at listening to books, as opposed to reading them. I’ve spent a lifetime reading, but am not the best listener. Books require concentrated attention across many sequences of ideas and thoughts, and I’m much better with […]
I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.
There was a comment below which I am now reflecting on…that this “This blog pertains to South Asians.” The comment was sincerely made, and I take no deep issue with it. Rather, I wonder what the purview of pertaining to South Asians is for each of us. Do we all see the same sky above …
Continue reading “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.”
The arrow of evolution
5,000 years of changeMost evolutionary biologists would agree with the contention that evolution has no long-term direction. In other words, evolutionary change is shaped by the contingencies and exigencies of the present set of circumstances, searchin…
Obscurantism in the service of transformation
The paper, Ancient Admixture in Human History, was peculiar as far as genetics publications go in that it foregrounds particular abstruse statistical methods developed due to the stimulus of genome-wide variation data. The surfeit of genomic data has resulted in the emergence of many subtle and almost impenetrable works laced with formalisms which daunt most […]
Diving into Chinese philosophy
Back when I was in college one of my roommates was taking a Chinese philosophy class for a general education requirement. A double major in mathematics and economics (he went on to get an economics Ph.D.) he found the lack of formal rigor in the field rather maddening. I thought this was fair, but I […]
The Truth is that history is not evolving toward Truth
My friend Walter Olson pointed me to this from John Locke: To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues. This is great and inspirational quote, but in most interpretive sieves I believe it is wrong. Hume’s assertion that “reason is […]
The Truth is that history is not evolving toward Truth
My friend Walter Olson pointed me to this from John Locke: To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues. This is great and inspirational quote, but in most interpretive sieves I believe it is wrong. Hume’s assertion that “reason is […]
Two thousand years of philosophy on the margin
A little less than two years ago I began to read Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy. It’s a big book, on the order of ~1000 pages. But that’s not the reason I’m just now finishing it. The book is divided by chronologically and thematically. I read about the ancients in about a […]
Reason is but a slave of passions as it always has been
David Hume stated that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” I don’t know about the ought part, that’s up for debate. But the is part seems empirically true. The reasons people give for this or that is often just a post hoc rationalization. To give a different twist to […]
Plato, St. Ambrose, Marcuse: heralds for our age
It galls me to agree with the proposition that Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato, but it is at least fair to admit that Western intellectual thought exists in dialogue with him and his thinking. But the spare and arrogant idealism which Plato and his followers promoted is not entirely alien to the landscape of human cognition. It is […]
The crowds knows better than you?
Justin Wolfers & Betsy Stevenson have a piece up in Bloomberg, Crowds Are This Election’s Real Winners. In The Signal and the Noise Nate Silver has a chapter on Wolfers’ belief that prediction markets are superior to the sort of quantitative analysis that is his stock & trade. The belief isn’t based on an intuition. […]
Being pro-life and pre-implantation diagnosis
The recent controversy over Peter Singer and Fordhman got me thinking about the logical implications of a consistent ethos. Singer certainly has a consistent ethos. Or at least he tries to work out the logical implications of his axioms, no matter where that goes. I don’t agree with Peter Singer’s utilitarianism because I am skeptical […]
The First Men and the Last Men
In the comments below there is a discussion about whether personhood is a continuous or categorical trait. I lean toward the former proposition as a matter of fact, but let’s entertain the second. What if personhood, and in particular consciousn…
On my perceived disagreements with Sam Harris
A reader below asked me to exposit in more detail what I only alluded to in my post, The scourging of Sam Harris, when it came to substantive disagreements. The reason I did not elaborate much in the post is because Sam Harris’ original contribut…
The perils of “reason”
In my post below in regards to Sam Harris’ recent interactions on the web I reasserted by suspicion of reason. This naturally elicited curiosity, or hostility, from some. I’ve talked about this before, but the illustration to the left gets …
The utility and reality of species
Of all the taxonomic ranks species is the most clear, distinct, and concrete. More practically, it is the level which most naturally falls out of the patterns of life’s tree. Or does it? If the term “species concept” does not ring a b…
Metaphysics Matters
Chattering classes here in the U.S. have recently been absorbed in discussions that dance around, but never quite address, a question that cuts to the heart of how we think about the basic architecture of reality: are human beings purely material, or something more? The first skirmish broke out when a major breast-cancer charity, Susan […]
How To Think About Quantum Field Theory
I continue to believe that “quantum field theory” is a concept that we physicists don’t do nearly enough to explain to a wider audience. And I’m not going to do it here! But I will link to other people thinking about how to think about quantum field theory. Over on the Google+, I linked to […]
Lives of Confucius: Civilization’s Greatest Sage Through the Ages
Link to review: Lives of Confucius: Civilization’s Greatest Sage Through the Ages.
The Problem of Democracy
Link to review: The Problem of Democracy.