Author Archives: Jesús Zamora Bonilla
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, […]
Has theoretical physics become a sleeping beauty?
The progress that physics experienced during the 20th century was probably one of the greatest and most everlasting successes of the humankind. Discovering the hidden and minute composition of matter and energy, as well as realising that the […]
On scientific co-authorship (& 3): Intelectual property rights and the individualization of items of knowledge
In our previous entries, we asked why it is that collaborating scientists prefer to publish one single paper in which all their contributions are ‘mixed’, instead of one individual paper by each co-author (with quotations to the other collaborator’s […]
On scientific co-authorship (2): An economic diversion, Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm
Let me leave aside for a moment our talk about scientists and papers, and bring up a topic that, at first sight, might seem totally unconnected: Ronald Coase’s economic theory about the firm and the allocation of property rights. […]