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 lead in terms of sellings, comments and criticisms. But by a fortunate coincidence, its publication […]
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 serve to add confidence to the ones already persuaded, but they give to the rest of […]
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, the Academy, had been Aristotle’s home for twenty years. I remember this well known phrase almost […]
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 one of the deepest and hardest questions in all philosophy. I have already written in Mapping […]
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 some kind of memory device, and making it live on a computer (see, e.g., Seung 2012) […]
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 is a German existentialist philosopher, who was Heidegger’s affair a few months ago. NEURATH: Well […]
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’ knows. A promising analytical approach to this problem has emerged in recent years, which is […]
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 Dan Sperber (though in both cases the labels are poorly informative of the multifarious work […]
In the previous entry , I described Nick Bostrom’s argument for the ‘simulation hypothesis’, i.e., the conjecture that we are very, very likely living not in a ‘real’ world, but within some kind of computer simulation, and ended offering some skeptical doubts about its structure by comparing it to Bertrand Russell’s prankish argument about whether […]
One important principle of any sensible social epistemology is that the fraction of crazy-sounding ideas that are really crazy is extremely high. Of course, a lot of crazy-sounding ideas have turned out being right (e.g., the evolution of different species from common ascent, the earth’s being a planet turning around a star, the atomic composition […]