When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.
A significant fraction of evangelical voters appear more likely to ignore the candidates' specific economic and foreign policy platforms in favor of concerns about gay marriage or abortion.
Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous.
For all of his bravado, obnoxiousness, hatred, and vitriol, the scariest thing about Trump, to me, is his unique combination of ignorance about the world, convolved with ignorance about himself.
On the question of information security, he claims that, in a Trump Administration, the U.S. government will not spy on its own citizens. If true, this would represent a turn away from the strong language that he has used about identifying terrorists on our soil.
On the question of preserving public lands, Trump replies that our elected officials have spent too long rewarding 'special interests,' by which I assume he doesn't mean petroleum companies and the Bundy family.
If innovations were predictable, they wouldn't be discoveries.
If our species is to survive, our future will probably require outposts beyond our own planet.
These days, gun violence can strike anywhere, from a church hall in Charleston to a movie theatre or a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado. But our response to it depends on whether that violence is understood to be terrorism.
By his own admission, Carson's remarkable hand-eye coordination allowed him to soar as a surgeon, and he used that success to build a lucrative reputation as a purveyor of advice for young and old. His book for young people is titled 'You Have a Brain.'
I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.
Donald Trump called for the closing of borders to Muslims; John McCain said, in response to the President's address on the San Bernardino shooting, that 'this is the war of our time.' As that shooting shows, we react to terrorism with far more intensity than we do to an ordinary crime.
We need to walk into the future, no matter how unnerving, with open eyes if society is to keep pace with technology.
Nothing can create something all the time due to the laws of quantum mechanics, and it's - it's fascinatingly interesting.
To me, what philosophy does best is reflect on knowledge that's generated in other areas.
People are interested in science, but they don't always know they're interested in science, and so I try to find a way to get them interested.
Local order in parts of the universe is always possible at the expense of heat and disorder dissipated to the external environment. The human body is one example: we take in energy from our environment to build up complex molecules that help power our bodies, and, in doing so, we release heat to the world around us.
Richard Nixon, famously, conducted his foreign policy according to the 'madman theory': he tried to convince enemy leaders that he was irrational and volatile in an attempt to intimidate them. But this was a potentially useful approach to foreign policy only because it was an act.
Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.
Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
