All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.
I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.
Many of us will be obsessed with one or another kind of secret or revelation, be it gossip about friends or ourselves, a fantasy about spies, or a worry about the most personal information now stored in data banks. But few of us think about secrets in general, or about the moral rights and wrongs of hiding or exposing them.
The stability of what's called the Standard Model of particle physics and its ability to make so many clever predictions with immense precision suggests that we may just be stuck with it, and there may never be an overthrow of that.
A 'philosophical dictionary' is not a dictionary of philosophy that you use to look up obscure thinkers or recondite terms. It is a collection of brief and pithy essays on diverse topics, informed by one vision, and usually arranged in alphabetical order.
I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.'
What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.
Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world.
Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.
Secrecy is one of the shadier sides of private and public life.
Life on a factory farm is well-nigh unbearable for the animals or birds, and it is often foul for the women and men who process the meat that results - especially in factories for chicken parts. But do not sentimentalize. Do not imagine barnyard life is a bowl of cherries.
Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.
In every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy.
The anti-Darwin movement has racked up one astounding achievement. It has made a significant proportion of American parents care about what their children are taught in school.
Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.
Dolomite is a whole mess of stuff, a mixture. It gets characterised as 'a stuff' because of the interest of oil geologists. It would have been a nonentity were it not for its applications.
Amartya Sen is best known to the general reader for his powerful essays on famine. He is an optimist about some of our gravest economic problems, such as mass starvation in a world that at present can easily produce more food than everyone can eat. Reason and voluntary participation are his watchwords.
Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.
Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things.
Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life.
