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Tuesday, April 19, 2016

On the Evolution of Language

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Geneticist Michael Denton's new book, somewhat awkwardly titled Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis , is a remarkable piece of philosoph...
Monday, April 18, 2016

A Legacy in Three Acts

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President Obama is at the point in his administration when the occupant of the White House begins to think hard about the legacy he'll l...
Saturday, April 16, 2016

Reductio ad Absurdum

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The controversy surrounding open access to any rest room or locker room one feels comfortable in may strike you as ridiculous or it may seem...
Friday, April 15, 2016

Pay it Forward

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Looking to do something that'll make a difference in people's lives? Why not consider Kiva : Kiva is a world-wide microfinance or...
Thursday, April 14, 2016

Nobody's Right If Everybody's Wrong**

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There's an interesting contretemps bubbling at Marquette University over one professor's criticism of another instructor, and it see...
Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Our Readership

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From time to time I like to take a moment to thank the many faithful readers of Viewpoint who visit us from all over the world. Most of our ...
Tuesday, April 12, 2016

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

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Physicist Sir James Jeans, contemplating the fact that the universe seems so astonishingly conformable to mathematics, once remarked that Go...
Monday, April 11, 2016

On Meaning

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Holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankl once wrote a book titled Man's Search for Meaning in which he asserted that man can...
Saturday, April 9, 2016

What They Hate

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Fareed Zakaria, a CNN commentator, recently did a series titled Why They Hate Us . The final installment might better have been subtitled Wh...
Friday, April 8, 2016

When Does Inconsistency Become Hypocrisy?

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One expects politicians and others who dabble in politics to sometimes say one thing but do another. It almost seems to be in their genes. I...
Thursday, April 7, 2016

Where Does Altruism Come From?

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Damon Linker argues at The Week that self-sacrifice is inexplicable on naturalism. Naturalism rests heavily upon evolutionary explanations ...
Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Are We Living in the Matrix?

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One of the perplexing metaphysical questions posed by philosophers has to do with the ontological nature of reality. Is matter the fundament...
Tuesday, April 5, 2016

The End of Moral Relativism

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The Atlantic's Jonathan Merritt argues that our culture's fling with moral relativism, a fling that's persisted for at least si...
Monday, April 4, 2016

Moral Paralysis

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In 2011 I ran the following post on moral relativism, and having talked about that topic recently in my classes I thought it'd be approp...
Saturday, April 2, 2016

Indoctrinating the Young

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An article in The Guardian by Nathalia Gjersoe is remarkable for what it suggests about current trends in the philosophy of education. The ...
Friday, April 1, 2016

Can Evolution Account for Consciousness?

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One of the many problems consciousness poses for naturalism (the view that only the natural world exists. There is no supernature) is the di...
Thursday, March 31, 2016

Falling Seas and Red Queens

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Science operates by making testable predictions. If those predictions don't come to pass the theory which generates them begins to teete...
Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Mind and Materialism

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Raymond Tallis at The New Atlantis discusses the devastating assault on philosophical materialism that began in the 1970s when American phi...
Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Robot Consciousness (Pt. II)

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As a follow-up to yesterday's post on Sophia, the robot featured in an article on robots and consciousness, it might be instructive to ...
Monday, March 28, 2016

Robot Consciousness (Pt. I)

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After a classroom discussion on some specific characteristics of consciousness that materialism has a difficult time explaining a student fo...