Although science was not born in the seventeenth century (since the need for reliable information about the environment is intrinsic to any human society, and disciplines such as mathematics, astronomy, or biology had already flourished splendidly in Classical Antiquity), we cannot deny that around the year 1600 the history of humanity crossed a decisive threshold […]
As we saw in our last entry, we must grant Gabriel that he does not conceive of the spirit and spiritual as an “immortal soul” or any similar ghostlike entity, but rather as something grounded in human thought—more specifically, in what relates to norms, values, laws, institutions, and rules of various kinds (I Am Not […]
In the our last entry, we saw the weakness of Gabriel’s ‘inism’ (the belief that to exist has to be identical to ‘exist in something’) as the most important logical fault of his ontology. We also saw that his idea that ‘the world’ (in the sense of a super-entity comprising the totality of real beings) […]
The main ontological thesis of the German philosopher Markus Gabriel could be summed up in the phrase: “the Whole does not exist, but everything exists.” If we replace “the Whole” with a more familiar word (“the world”), the first part of the thesis amounts to the striking claim that “the world does not exist”—a phrase […]
We saw in our past entry how the moral philosophy theory known as longtermism is rooted in the historical trend towards ‘the expansion of the circle of empathy’, in order to include all future human beings (or ‘persons’, we might say, including non-human, or post-human persons), and also commented on some flaws of the theory […]
Author: Daryl Janzen, Observatory Manager and Instructor, Astronomy, University of Saskatchewan Few ideas in modern science have reshaped our understanding of reality more profoundly than space-time — the interwoven fabric of space and time at the heart of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Space-time is frequently described as the “fabric of reality.” In some accounts […]
One of the most popular versions today of the idea that there can be moral progress—in the sense that our values and moral standards can keep improving—is the claim, much in vogue now, that such progress takes the form of what’s often called the expansion of the circle of empathy. The idea is that, in […]
I finished my last entry expressing my perplexity by the ‘solution’ mathematicians offered six decades ago to the problem of the continuum : Cohen’s theorem according to which both the assumption that there is some set (say, C) larger than the set of natural numbers but smaller than the set of real numbers, and the […]
Infinity has always been one of the most fascinating and perplexing concepts in mathematics. For ancient Greek mathematicians, it was (in a similar way to the notion of zero) something like a non-concept, i.e., something that one was not allowed to think, and only might express and use by means of circumloquia at the best […]
Author: Karen K. Christensen-Dalsgaard, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, MacEwan University In the 11th century in Cairo, the foundations for modern science were laid through the detention of an innocent man. The mathematician Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham had been tasked with regulating the flow of the Nile, but when he saw the river […]