Category: Naturalism
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Strawson’s Vacuous Materialism
In Does Matter Think? I wrote: . . . I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers. Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think. But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand. And that is my point. You can posit…
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Does Matter Think?
If matter (wholly material beings) could think, then matter would not be matter as currently understood. Can abstracta think? Sets count as abstracta. Can a set think? Could the set of primes contemplate itself and think the thought, I am a set, and each of my members is a prime number? Given what we know…
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Do You Think Matter Thinks?
If matter could think, then matter would not be matter as currently understood. Can abstracta think? Sets count as abstracta. Can a set think? Could the set of primes contemplate itself and think the thought, I am a set, and each of my members is a prime number? Given what we know sets to be…
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Theism Meets Metaphysical Naturalism
The following is an excerpt of an e-mail from the Barcelona lawyer, Daniel Vincente Carillo. As I mentioned to him in a private e-mail, I admire him for tackling these great questions, and doing so in a foreign language. The pursuit of these questions ennobles us while humbling us at the same time. Carillo writes,…
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Plantinga Reviews Philip Kitcher, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism
Here. The wild diversity of religious doctrines suggests to Kitcher that they are all almost certainly false. Plantinga makes an interesting response: But even for whole systems: there is certainly wide variety here, but how does it follow that they are all almost certainly false? Or even that any particular one is almost false? Kitcher's…
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God as an Ontological Category Mistake
John Anderson's rejection of God is radical indeed. A. J. Baker writes: Anderson, of course, upholds atheism, though that is a rather narrow and negative way of describing his position given its sweep in rejecting all rationalist conceptions of essences and ontological contrasts in favour of the view that whatever exists is a natural occurrence…
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Dawkins Versus Swinburne
Richard Dawkins reviews Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? (Oxford, 1996) here. What follows are the meatiest excerpts from Dawkins' review together with my critical comments. I have bolded the passages to which I object. (show) Swinburne is ambitious. He will not shrink into those few remaining backwaters which scientific explanation has so far failed…
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Is the Success of Science Evidence of Metaphysical Naturalism?
A reader poses this question: Some people argue that the success of science using methodological naturalism is evidence of metaphysical naturalism because, according to them, why would the methods work unless the subject was naturalistic? My question is: do you think this is a fair argument to make? It depends on what exactly the argument…
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D. M. Armstrong on Religion
(Photo credit: David Chalmers via Andrew Chrucky) I posted on Armstrong's naturalism yesterday, and that got me to thinking whether he ever said anything anywhere about religion. A little searching turned up the following 2002 interview of Armstrong by Andrew Chrucky. Here is an excerpt that touches upon Armstrong's view of religion: Chrucky: Let me…
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A Sketch of Armstrong’s Naturalism and Why I am not a Naturalist
The late David Malet Armstrong has a serious claim to being Australia's greatest philosopher. His life work is summed up in his Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics (Oxford UP, 2010). It is from the Introduction to this slim volume that I draw the following précis of his naturalism. Armstrong on Naturalism 1. Naturalism for Armstrong is…
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Armstrong, Quine, Universals, Abstract Objects, and Naturalism
A Serbian reader inquires, I have read your latest post on truthmakers. Among other things, you mention [David] Armstrong's view on abstract objects. As I read elsewhere (not in Armstrong own works, I have not read anything by him yet) he was realist about universals and gives a very voluminous defense of his view. Does…
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Naturalism as Anti-Philosophy
According to William Ernest Hocking, to philosophize is to assume that the universe has an objective meaning, one that can be discerned by us. "And since meanings are something more than the bare facts of the natural order, all philosophy is, in its assumptions, contradictory to naturalism, taking naturalism strictly as the negative doctrine that…
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The Relevance of Conscious Robots for the Philosophy of Mind
Do you understand lasagne? Of course you do. But I understand it better because I know how to make it from ingredients none of which is lasagne. (If I were to 'make' lasagne by fusing eight squares of lasagne, and you were a philosopher, you would protest that I hadn't made lasagne but had 'presupposed' it. …
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Would Naturalism Make Life Easier?
If only naturalism were unmistakably and irrefutably true! A burden would be lifted: no God, no soul, no personal survival of death, an assured exit from the wheel of becoming, no fear of being judged for one’s actions. One could have a good time with a good conscience, Hefner-style. (Or one could have a murderous…
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Galen Strawson versus Colin McGinn
Galen Strawson in Little Gray Cells: The intuitive puzzle is clear, and McGinn presents it with multilayered intensity. He is right that we can never hope to understand how consciousness as we know it in everyday life relates to the brain considered as a lump of matter. But it doesn't follow that consciousness is a…