As readers of this blog will surely know, the economics of scientific knowledge is a topic on which I have worked extensively, and also written here not a few entries. Now I want to tackle a common objection to that field in itself: the idea that studying science “as if it were a market” commits […]
In the first entry of this series, I briefly explained Christian List’s attempt to vindicate the ontological and scientific reality of intentional action as a real emergent phenomenon. In a nutshell, intentional, deliberate and often ‘rational’ action is not a fiction (as some skeptics like Alex Rosenberg have defended ), but a totally legitimate inhabitant […]
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 […]
On April 10 th 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope project released the first image ever of a black hole. Five simultaneous press conferences, in Brussels, Taipei, Santiago de Chile, Tokyo and Washington were broadcast live, staging a global media event for astrophysics. Besides the inevitable memes in the so-called social media, more serious press outlets […]
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 […]