The Neo-Confucian Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi or Chu Hsi (1130-1200) famously posited two metaphysical principles often compared to Aristotle... | Continue reading
Panpsychism is the view that conscious awareness pervades the physical world, down to the level of basic particles. In recent years, philos... | Continue reading
Atomism takes all material objects to be composed of basic particles that are not themselves breakable into further components. In Western ... | Continue reading
Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” (from his collection Labyrinths ) famously describes an infinite library, comprising books which t... | Continue reading
To say that the material world alone exists is not terribly informative unless we have some account of what matter is. Those who are most ... | Continue reading
What is essential to a well-functioning society? In a famous passage from The Great Learning traditionally attributed to Confucius (551-47... | Continue reading
By “logic” we might mean (a) the rules that determine the difference between good and bad reasoning, or (b) some formal system that codifies... | Continue reading
In 1949, in a festschrift devoted to Einstein , Kurt Gödel published a very short but profound paper titled “A Remark About the Relati... | Continue reading
Aquinas tells us that curiosity is a vice . Before you clutch your pearls, dear village atheist reader, know that Aquinas was not condemni... | Continue reading
Philosopher of science John Dupré, like Nancy Cartwright, Paul Feyerabend, and others, has developed powerful and influential criticisms of ... | Continue reading
I haven’t done a “Physicists say the darndest things” post in a while. People usually ask me to write one up every time a Lawrence Krauss, ... | Continue reading
The “problem of other minds” goes like this. I have direct access to my own thoughts and experiences, but not to yours. I can perceive... | Continue reading
Here are two things every serious student of logical fallacies understands. First, if what is at issue is the soundness of an argument ... | Continue reading
I have argued both that the lockdown was a justifiable initial reaction to the Covid-19 crisis, and that skeptics ought nevertheless to... | Continue reading
Mathematics is an iceberg on which the Titanic of modern empiricism founders. It is good now and then to remind ourselves why, and Gott... | Continue reading
In his first Meditation , Descartes famously tries to push doubt as far as he can, in the hope of finding something that cannot be do... | Continue reading
A naïve understanding of materialism attributes to it a naïve understanding of matter. Matter, common sense says, is more or less the... | Continue reading
Bernard Wuellner’s always-useful Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy defines violence as “action contrary to the nature of a thing.”... | Continue reading
A voluntarist conception of persons takes the will to be primary and the intellect to be secondary. That is to say, for voluntarism... | Continue reading
In his essay “Quantum Mechanics and Ontology” in his anthology Philosophy in an Age of Science , Hilary Putnam notes that “mathematica... | Continue reading
Comics, like science fiction, can be a great source for philosophical thought experiments. Recently I’ve been re-reading one of the ... | Continue reading