Author archives: Jesús Zamora Bonilla

Did the first Americans come from Bilbao?

Did the first Americans come from Bilbao?

AnthropologyArchaeologyGeneticsHistory

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

As everybody knows, the people from Bilbao are born wherever they want. And, according to one of the most captivating conjectures in contemporary archaeology, this might have been so in a totally unexpected way even from many millennia ago. The conjecture I am referring to is the ‘Solutrean hypothesis’ about the first human population of […]

Skepticism, a short uncertain history (6): The mother of all lost causes

Skepticism, a short uncertain history (6): The mother of all lost causes

EpistemologyPhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

Descartes’ opening of the Pandora’s box of skepticism, and the liberation of the Evil Demon it triggered, started a terrible shock in the tectonic plates of Western thought, a shock whose waves still reach us with more or less strength, and that mainly contributed to configure our contemporary intellectual landscape. I shall devote the next […]

Skepticism, a short uncertain history (5): Descartes’ evil daemon

Skepticism, a short uncertain history (5): Descartes’ evil daemon

EpistemologyPhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

Together with the discovery of America, the Protestant Reformation was probably the main historical factor in the (European) Modern Age. As we saw in the previous entry, the debate between different Christian denominations was a perfect breeding ground to put into use the recently rediscovered arguments of the ancient Greek Skeptics (though in practice the […]

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (4): the renaissance of skepticism

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (4): the renaissance of skepticism

EpistemologyPhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

As we saw in the previous entry of this series, skepticism had a relatively minor role during the development of medieval philosophy, with the main exception of the interesting possibility of interpreting the Pseudo-Dionysius as a skeptic about our knowledge of the nature of God (not, of course, of its being… save for ‘being’ being […]

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (3): medieval doubts

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (3): medieval doubts

EpistemologyPhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

Perhaps you ignore that the most influential philosopher of the early Middle Ages did not really exist. This Zenoan paradox is explained by the fact that the writings of this philosopher were falsely attributed to a different, and much more authoritative person, and hence, after the counterfeit was established about one thousand years later by […]

What is consciousness? (2): Is the hard problem really hard?

What is consciousness? (2): Is the hard problem really hard?

NeurosciencePhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

As we saw in the previous entry of this series, philosophers of mind usually distinguish between what (after David Chalmers) they called the ‘easy’ and the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness. The ‘easy’ problem refers to how to explain the functioning of the brain: how does it manage to do things that seem to require some […]

Science and the search of beauty (2): the halflings’ view

Science and the search of beauty (2): the halflings’ view

Philosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

In my past entry I described the tribe of the ‘Halflings’ as those authors who try to find a middle road between the ‘Platonist’ that identify beauty as one essential goal of scientific research (even conflating it, in the end, with truth itself), and the ‘Sceptics’ that assume that aesthetic criteria are essentially subjective and […]