Author Archives: Jesús Zamora Bonilla
The limits of animal ethics
One of the most important ethical debates of the next decades will be, no doubt, the one about our moral obligations towards non-human beings, and in particular, towards the members of other animal species. Very likely, not only philosophical discussions, […]
Why people believe in the soul (& 3): How does the brain perceive itself?
In the past entries we have examined three types of ‘abnormal’ psychic experiences that have surely had an important role in the creation and diffusion of the idea of an ‘immaterial soul’ that contains our personal identity, and that can […]
Why people believe in the soul (2): near-death and mystical experiences
In the past entry we examined how “out-of-body experiences” (OBEs) might have an influence in the belief in a “soul” separated from the body. Now we shall take a look to the other two types of “abnormal” psychological experiences […]
Why people believe in the soul (1): Out-of-body experiences
The idea that human beings are composed by two kind of ‘substances’, a material body and a spiritual mind, or soul, is probably as old as modern human beings, and has certainly insufflated most of the world religions, as well […]
Requiem for final causes
Darwin’s great breakthrough was that of finding the only one explanation of the great variety and complexity we find in the living world, which is compatible with the fact that the matter and energy of which living beings are made […]
Karl Popper’s ‘constitution of science’ (& 3)
In the second entry of this series, I discussed one of the two big problems of Karl Popper’s ‘Proto-constitution of science’, namely, whether following in the strictest possible way Popper’s falsificationism would necessarily be the most efficient means to […]
Karl Popper’s ‘constitution of science’ (2)
By the end of the first part of this series I listed the most important norms included in what Ian Jarvie calls Karl Popper’s ‘Proto-constitution of science’. Now I will start discussing several important problems of this Popperian rules. […]
Karl Popper’s ‘constitution of science’ (1)
In spite of the title of his most important book (The Logic of Scientific Discovery -LSD-, published originally in German as The Logik der Forschung, in 1935), Karl Popper’s fundamental claim about the rules of science is that […]
How Buddha became a Christian saint
As I mentioned in passing in my last entry, many, if not most, of the oldest stories about Christian martyrs and saints are nothing but legendary fabrications, something that scholars knew perfectly well since at least the time of […]
From Constantine to Justinian: the triumph of Christian ‘terrorism’
One book that has caused much stir in the past months is Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. I confess I approached the book with some skepticism, for ‘the classical world’, I thought, […]