A Philosopher and Blogger Debate Determinism Once More!
Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, and The Matter With Things, is an expert on brain lateralization – the division between the right and…
Debating a Determinist: A Philosopher and Blogger Dialogue on Determinism, Free Will, and Philosophy
The thesis of determinism is one of the strangest theories promoted by many academic philosophers. Many determinists seem to think that they can assert the absence of…
The Metaphysical Status of Preferences: In Defense of Free Will
The pseudonymous “Robot Philosopher,” following Sam Harris, suggests that since we do not choose our preferences, we do not have free will. This is an odd line…
Plato’s Gorgias Is Still Worth Reading
As with The Republic, in The Gorgias Plato is trying to defend the idea that it is worth it to try to be a good person even…
Curt Jaimungal: Humor and Free Will
My apologies in advance for writing about humor in an unfunny way. Someone wrote once that in a certain prolonged analysis of humor (Freud?) there was not…
Is Evolutionary Psychology Immoral?
“In 1800, half of all those born died as children; two centuries later, almost none did. More and more people who would not have survived in the…
Nihilism, Ethics, and the Trolley Car Dilemma
The Trolley Problem is a potentially morally corrupting piece of pro-murder propaganda with nihilistic tendencies. It imagines a scenario where a runaway trolley can be diverted by…
Elite Power and the Politics of Division: Neema Parvini’s “The Populist Delusion”
Neema Parvini. The Populist Delusion. Perth, Australia: Imperium Press, 2022. What entails the backlash against populist politics, a political ideology that once held respectable admiration in…
The Determinists Strike Back: A Social Media Dialogue
What follows is a real dialogue exchange. Names have been altered except for Richard Cocks. “If determinism is true, it makes no sense to speak of someone…
Does Individualism Promote Ugliness?
Beauty is communal. We know what beautiful architecture looks like. Tourists travel from all over the world to see the buildings of Italy, the Baptistry in Florence,…
Can Medieval Wisdom Cure Modern Insanity? A Review of Rémi Brague’s “Curing Mad Truths”
Rémi Brague. Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. In this collection of lectures, Brague begins…
Annihilation: A Failed Sci-Fi Adaptation of René Girard
Based on a book by Jeff VanderMeer, the movie Annihilation[1] is a fairly straightforward presentation of the ideas of René Girard. The book is more nuanced and…
Mystery and Order in the Human Brain
In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist writes that a bird, as with the rest of us, needs two types of consciousness simultaneously. It must be…
Epistemic Nihilism Leaves Only Brute Force
Some modern proponents of identity politics causes, influenced a little by Marxism and a lot by postmodernism, claim that power is what matters, not truth. What we…
The Personal is Philosophical: Plato, Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Tarkovsky
“What I love very much is your being yourself style, and I wish that you keep this skill and manage to share it with all around, and…