Christian List, a German professor in the London School of Economics, is one of the most prolific and intelligent authors in the new generation of philosophers of social science. He has authored and co-authored a formidable number of extremely interesting papers in areas like social choice, formal epistemology, judgment aggregation, deliberative democracy or political philosophy […]
[Read Part 1 & Part 2] VIOLETA: You know the shape of the classical Italian coffee-pot, like the one Faustino has just braught. It consists of two truncated cones or pyramids, joined by their narrowest parts. I claim that the structure of the maps of values of a scientific discipline has a structure similar to […]
[Read the first part here] LORENZO: Alright, Violeta, we may admit that the members of a scientific discipline may agree to assess the conjectures and models each of them is proposing according to some consensual rule, and we may also admit that this rule may be impartial , in the sense that it will often […]
LORENZO: We are very thankful to you, Faustino, for your invitation to see today’s football match in your home. This morning, in the Philosophy of Science Congress, you have been one of the few recalling that our national team plays the quarter-finals of the World Cup. FAUSTINO: You are welcome. I am very glad to […]
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, but even the attitudes of a big portion of citizens about this topic, are going […]
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 be ‘separated’ from our physical bodies, obviously including the possibility of surviving the biological death […]
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 that are surely related to that belief: “near-death experiences” (NDEs) and “mystical experiences” (MEs). Near-death 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 as a big number of philosophical theories about human nature. Even non-religious people admit in […]
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 of can only do what they do because of purely physical mechanisms. There is only […]
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 attain what he considers in The Logic of Scientific Discovery to be the major goal of […]