Category archives: Philosophy of science

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 […]

Mapping interdisciplinarity

Mapping interdisciplinarity

Philosophy of scienceSociology

By Silvia Román

Some decades ago, the American social scientist Donald T. Campbell imagined interdisciplinary research as a fish-scale structure according to which scholars should make an effort to create links between disciplines, spanning areas ignored by others, in an overlapping pattern aiming to cover the entire web of knowledge. He suggested that scholars should overcome 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 […]

Measuring the reality of the wavefunction

Measuring the reality of the wavefunction

Philosophy of sciencePhysicsQuantum physics

By Daniel Manzano

Quantum mechanics represented a revolution in physics with implications in many other fields like chemistry and biology. It also conducted changes on some of the main scientific lines of thought, including a farewell to determinism. In the science before quantum mechanics probability was accepted only as a lack of knowledge from the system being studied […]

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 […]