Author Archives: Jesús Zamora Bonilla
The Enlightenment wars (& 3): but...what kind of humanism do we need?
In the two previous entries (1, 2) of this series I described the different diagnoses that Marina Garcés and Steven Pinker make of humanity’s current predicament, without concealing my sympathies for the latter’s: with up […]
The Enlightenment wars (2): the details
Are we in the best of the times, as Steven Pinker asserts? Or do we live in a ‘posthumous’ society, to say it with the favourite image of Marina Garcés? As I told in the previous entry, it is […]
The Enlightenment wars (1): progress or decline?
Keep in mind the word Enlightenment, because it’s very likely that it will be one of the most fashionable concepts within the next months. At a global level, Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment now, will probably carry the […]
Humanities: how not to defend them, and how to do it (2)
In the past entry I presented a criticism to a few common arguments (or rather, topics) that we often find ‘in defence’ of the humanities. Those arguments were problematic not only because their fallacious nature, but because they only […]
Humanities: how not to defend them, and how to do it (1)
Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas (Plato is my friend, but Truth is still a better friend of mine), they say Aristotle whispered when he explained the arguments with which he demolished the theories of his teacher, whose school, […]
Panpsychism: Is mind everywhere?
The problem of what is the relation between matter and mind, and more particularly, between the physical stuff of our brain, on the one hand, and our consciousness and their conscious, qualitative states (also known as ‘qualia’), certainly is […]
Your mind will never be uploaded to a computer
One of the most popular ideas within the new and fashionable transhumanism craze is that, in the future humans, will be able of reaching a kind of ‘immortality’ by decoding the information contained in your brain, ‘uploading’ it to […]
Hume’s viagra or the new riddle of induction
DAVID HUME: You’re not going to believe me, Otto, but I have a new girlfriend.
OTTO NEURATH: Com’on, Dave, at your age, and within this crappy retirement home in which we’re confined.
HUME: Incredible or not, it’s a fact. She […]
What do we think? Scientific knowledge after judgment aggregation
After centuries of debate, there is no agreement about whether ‘knowledge’ must be essentially conceived as a cognitive state of individual minds, or must be attributed to some collective entity, i.e., whether it’s me, or we, who ‘really’ […]
What is reason for?
What does reason consist really in? What it is for? And why are humans, of all the millions of species having populated the earth, the only one that enjoys such a wonderful capacity? The French psychologist Hugo Mercier and anthropologist […]