Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Scientism

  • Sweet Dreams of Dennett

    The following first appeared on 15 January 2006 at the old Powerblogs site.  Here it is again, considerably reworked. ……….. I saw Daniel Dennett's Sweet Dreams (MIT Press, 2005) on offer a while back at full price, but declined to buy it: why shell out $30 to hear Dennett repeat himself one more time? But the other day it…

  • Philosophy Always Buries Its Undertakers

    Philosophy always buries its undertakers (Etienne Gilson) and resurrects its dead. There is a semi-competent article in The Guardian entitled Philosophy Isn't Dead Yet that is worth a look.  Why 'semi-competent'? The author characterizes metaphysics as ". . . the branch of philosophy that aspires to the most general understanding of nature – of space…

  • Another Example of Awful Science Journalism

    My first example is here.  Read it for context and for some necessary distinctions.  Now for a second example.  Adam Frank writes, For Smolin there is no timeless world and there are no timeless laws. Time, he says, is real and nothing can escape it. Time, of course, seems real to us. We live in…

  • The Theological Virtues and the Scientistic Virtues

    The theological virtues are three: faith, hope, and charity.  The scientistic virtues are two: faith and hope.  The scientistic types, pinning their hopes on future science,  are full of faith in things unseen, things that are incomprehensible now but will, they hope, become comprehensible in the fullness of time.  They thirst less for justice and…

  • Thomas Nagel, Heretic

    Andrew Ferguson writes on the the explosion of hostility toward Thomas Nagel after the publication of his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos.  Here is my overview of the book.  More detailed posts on the same book are collected under the Nagel rubric. For a non-philosopher, Ferguson's treatment is accurate.  Here are a couple of  interesting excerpts in…

  • Krauss Kreamed

    Ed Feser is quite the polemicist, as witness his latest flogging of Lawrence Krauss.  Many commentators with no theological ax to grind — such as David Albert, Massimo Pigliucci, Brian Leiter, and even New Atheist featherweight Jerry Coyne — slammed Krauss’s amateurish foray into philosophy.  Here’s some take-to-the-bank advice to would-be atheist provocateurs: When even…

  • Bull Meets Shovel: Could Consciousness Be A Conjuring Trick?

    The following statement by Nicholas Humphrey (Psychology, London School of Economics) is one among many answers to the question: What do you believe is true though you cannot prove it? I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is…

  • The Abysmally Ignorant Jerry Coyne

    Jerry Coyne complains: Another problem is that scientists like me are intimidated by philosophical jargon, and hence didn’t interrupt the monologues to ask for clarification for fear of looking stupid. I therefore spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff like “epistemology” and “ontology” (I can never get those terms straight since I rarely use…

  • Is Neuroscience Relevant to Understanding Prayer and Meditation?

    One aspect of contemporary scientism is the notion that great insights are to be gleaned from neuroscience about the mind and its operations.  If you want my opinion, the pickin's are slim indeed and confusions are rife. This is your brain on prayer: A test subject is injected with a dye that allows the researcher to study…

  • Scientism

    Those who hold that the only knowledge is scientific knowledge will not be content to restrict themselves to such knowledge; they will be tempted to pass off as scientific what is not.  The prime and best example is scientism itself: it is passed off as scientific when it is a philosophical thesis with all the…

  • When Philosophical Questions Grow Up Do They Leave Home? Some Bad Arguments of Lawrence Krauss Exposed

    A tip of the hat to Professor Joel Hunter for referring me to a recent discussion between philosopher Julian Baggini and physicist Lawrence Krauss. We have come to expect shoddy scientistic reasoning from Professor Krauss (see here) and our expectation is duly fulfilled on this occasion as on the others. The issue under debate is whether…

  • What is Scientism?

    Alfred Centauri refers us to Scientism: Why Science is a Bad Philosopher, an article worth reading.  The definitions of 'scientism' the author approvingly quotes suggest that he would accept my characterization: Scientism is a philosophical thesis that belongs to the sub-discipline of epistemology. It is not a thesis in science, but a thesis about science. …

  • My Position on Free Will

    This from a Norwegian reader: I have been enjoying your blog for a couple of years now, and I have to say that I like how your mind works. There are a lot of issues I am thinking about currently regarding philosophy and that didn't change after reading Angus Menuge's book Agents Under Fire. If…

  • Nonsense about Descartes from the Science Page of the New York Times

    This is an old post from the Powerblogs site.  Now seems an opportune time to give it a home here.  One of the purposes of this weblog is to combat scientism. …………….. Here we read: But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes,…

  • Farewell to Krauss, A Universe From Nothing

    The book is due back at the library today, and good riddance.  A few parting shots to put this turkey to bed.  The book is a mishmash of bad philosophy, badly written, and popularization of contemporary cosmology.  I cannot comment on the accuracy of the popularization, but the philosophy is indeed bad and demonstrates why we…