Philosophy

Yesterday, in the P Z Myers quote-mining and distortion thread, I happened to cite Lewontin’s infamous 1997 remark in his NYRB article, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” on a priori imposition of materialist censorship on origins science, which reads in the crucial part:

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

To my astonishment, I was promptly accused of quote-mining and even academic malpractice, because I omitted the following two sentences, which — strange as it may seem —  some evidently view as justifying the above censoring imposition:

The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

To my mind, instead, these last two sentences are such a sad reflection of bias and ignorance, that their omission is an act of charity to a distinguished professor. Read More ›

What does it mean for the design debate if Spinoza outsells Heidegger?

In Prospect (25 May 2011), Rebecca Goldstein advises us to “Sell Descartes, buy Spinoza,” because “Investors, take note: this Dutch rationalist is a hot stock.”She starts out taking a swipe at glitterate airheads,

Thinking of buying shares in a great philosopher? The first question you need to ask is whether you’re interested in long or short-term investment. If you are looking long-term, then prepare yourself for serious scholarship. Alternatively, short-term investment could merely involve comparing the battle over women’s hemlines on catwalks in Milan and New York to Wittgenstein’s language-games. Investors must also keep in mind a philosopher’s obscurity, as this allows room for interpretation. Counter-intuitive shock appeal is also a plus.

But then, because she really is tired of post-modernism’s “whatever”, she gets serious: Read More ›

        Here: In Never Let Me Go, a novel by the Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro (and now a motion picture), children at a boarding school in the beautiful English countryside are raised with little contact with the outside world. The truth about the origin and identity of the students of Hailsham School is veiled.But by picking up on subtle clues and hints dropped in guarded conversations, one might begin to figure out that the children are all human clones, whose sole purpose is to become, after reaching adulthood, sources for organ “donations.” After three or four such donations, a clone would “complete,” that is, die. It gets better … Salvo is currently fundraising and any donation will Read More ›

Senior scientist at the Biologic Institute, Ann Gauger, reflects on “Life, Purpose, Mind: Where the Machine Metaphor Fails”, Evolution News & Views (June 1, 2011):

Up until now, the materialist, reductionist method has been very successful, because cells can be ground up, probed, measured and tested in a way that life forces or agency can’t be. But now molecular, cellular, and developmental biologists are drowning in a flood of data that we don’t know how to interpret. We do not know, for example, how to read a genome from an unknown new species to say what kind of organism it will produce. We can only determine what other genomes it most closely resembles. In order to predict the nature and appearance of the organism with that genome, we would need to know — just for starters — the maternal and paternal contributions to the egg and sperm, the whole of the developmental path from egg to adult, plus the particular effects of any mutations within that genome on its phenotype, not to mention its environmental history. Read More ›

From G. K. Chesterton, an early twentieth century Catholic writer, both anti-materialist and anti-Dawinist, in his Orthodoxy: (Courtesy Super flumina )

As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out… You can explain a man’s detention at Hanwell[1] by an indifferent public by saying that it is the crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not worthy. The explanation does explain. Similarly you may explain the order in the universe by saying that all things, even the souls of men, are leaves inevitably unfolding on a utterly unconscious tree—the blind destiny of matter. The explanation does explain, though not, of course, so completely as the madman’s. But the point here is that the normal human mind not only objects to both, but feels to both the same objection. Its approximate statement is that if the man in Hanwell is the real God, he is not much of a god. And, similarly, if the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk. The deity is less divine than many men… Read More ›

Forrest, a prof at Eastern Louisiana University, is considered a big expert on the intelligent design community and the dangers it poses. I put off explaining why she isn’t a  big expert, but can’t decently do so any longer. Read More ›

In The New York Times (May 22, 2011), Justin E. H. Smith raises for discussion, “The Flight of Curiosity” from philosophy, noting that today’s budding philosopher may not even find curiosity an asset, compared to showing colleagues how perfectly focused she has been in graduate school,” and how little she knows of anything “that does not fall within the current boundaries of the discipline.” A far cry, he says, from the days when science was called, for good reason, “natural philosophy”: Read More ›

Moving beyond (at last, one hopes) “The day we left the Darwin lobby in charge of the office”, the journal Synthese has a great new issue on scientific realism, dedicated to Peter Lipton (d. 2007): Scientific Realism Quo Vadis? Theories, Structures, Underdetermination and Reference here.

It includes Read More ›

Hey, this phil sci jaw isn’t the GapYawnder you were expecting:

This month, we [Routledge, publishers] asked Alex Rosenberg – Professor of Philosophy at Duke Univversity and author of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction – to tell us about why philosophy of science matters, and got some answers we didn’t expect!

Here. As in Read More ›

I offer up this great 2007 op-ed by Paul Davies, in part because it remains very relevant and likely will remain so for a very long time. Submitted with minimal comment for now, though here is an excerpt: When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth — and fixed forevermore. Therefore, to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical Read More ›

Look, it’s the armchair, okay? It’s got to go. There are real philosophers out there, besides which great scientists have taken the philosophy of science very seriously.

Undeterred by that history, Stephen Hawking recently dismissed philosophy in The Grand Design (with Leonard Mlodinow). In his view, philosophy did not contribute to knowledge compared with science. His view garnered a good deal of disapproval. The Economist sniffed,

There are actually rather a lot of questions that are more subtle than the authors think. It soon becomes evident that Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow regard a philosophical problem as something you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you have run out of Sudoku puzzles. Read More ›

ID friendly philosophers Tim McGrew (of Western Michigan University) and Lydia McGrew offer some thoughts on “undesigned coincidences” as evidence for the reliability of documentary evidence. Using a passage in the Gospel of John, Lydia argues,

… as John is telling the story about the feeding of the five thousand, it would be quite natural for him to say that Jesus asked Philip where they could buy bread if he were really an eyewitness–that is, because he remembered that Jesus did ask Philip. (Tim talks about why it was Philip in the interview.) But John himself might have had to stop and think for a moment if someone had asked him, “Why did Jesus ask Philip rather than any of the other disciples?” Presumably when John told the story, he wasn’t particularly thinking about some special reason for Jesus to select Philip for the question.But if someone were forging the story as fiction, he would have a reason for choosing to use a given disciple as a character at that point in his fictional narrative, and therefore he would be unlikely to choose that character without making the reason clearer to his readers.

Interesting observation. A commenter notes that Read More ›

Yes, really.

Recently, in a guest edited issue of philosophy journal Synthese, anti-ID Louisiana U prof Barbara Forrest broomsticked – of all people – Baylor prof Frank Beckwith, framed as an ID supporter. And anyone who keeps up with the issues knows he isn’t. The scandal here is that Forrest is supposed to be a big expert on ID (testified at the Dover show trial), but didn’t seem to know that easily found fact. Synthesedisowned her article, putting a disclaimer on it. Meanwhile, another far better known philosophy prof, Larry Laudan, is outraged at being broomsticked in the same issue of Synthese by Robert Pennock, another anti-ID-for-a-living prof.

A friend just whisked this under my nose:

There is a discussion online about the close dates between Francis Beckwith’s submission to Synthese [in response
to Forrest] and its acceptance. What has not been brought up—if the right information was given—is the submission and acceptance dates of the articles in the evolution/ID issue. It turns out all of the articles in that issue of the journal (except one), including Forrest’s, had the exact same turn-around time as Beckwith’s. So, if Beckwith’s article is problematic for a quick turnaround, then so is virtually the entire issue. Here are the submission and acceptance dates for the articles in question: Read More ›

Shimon Malin explains, Nature Loves to Hide (Oxford University Press, p. 6), why you don’t need science for that: One role of science is to explain phenomena, anf an explanation is different from “economy of thought.” Consider the example of tides. People made accurate tables of the times of high and low tides in many locations, but the phenomenon of tides was not understood until Newton came along and explained it as the joint effect of the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon on the waters of the oceans. This discovery did not make it possible to calculate the times of high and low tides in specific locations. These depended on many complicated factors such as the contours Read More ›

In The Nature of Nature , Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse offers us his take on ethics: “Ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good cooperators.” (—Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, 1985), p. 855)

Wilson has since dropped off this vine, so let’s just go with Ruse:

What kind of metaethical justification can one give for the love commandment or a Rawlsian justice-as-fairness? I would argue that ultimately there is no justification that can be given! Read More ›