Digital Devils and (Chat) GPT-3
“The Robots exact a tribute—a certain tithe of our humanity—to do commerce with them” Prometheus casts an ambiguous figure among the shades of mythic history. While…
Brain Lateralization and the Limits of Kant’s Moral Theory
Iain McGilchrist is a philosopher, psychiatrist, and neuroscientist with a key interest in brain lateralization, the division of the brain into right and left hemispheres and the…
Determinism and the Good Life Are Incompatible
This article is a continuation of an interaction with a blogger calling himself Robot Philosopher. RP is a polemicist and likes to pepper his arguments with snide…
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…
What is Perversion?
Etymologically, perversion designates an overturning, a thorough subversion with respect to a proper telos, a natural course and end. To pervert an art is to turn it…
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…
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…
The Problems of Technology as God
In our Age of Information, we are bombarded daily by answers forged to distract us from natural questions, questions we are born to ask. Technology does 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…
The Bankruptcy of Evolutionism
Evolutionism is a “scientific theory”. By that we usually mean that it is a doctrine that abstracts “scientifically” data, or strictly quantifiable facts, without any concern (or…
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…
Science and Religion Revisited: A Provocative Lesson for Today’s Christians
For decades, now, debates on “Science versus Religion” have remained by and large inconclusive.[1] Could this be due to the debates’ having been systematically framed conceptually by…
On Science
Sometimes, in a set of reflections, one needs to slow down and describe certain details with delicacy and fine attention; sometimes, though, summary strokes are needed. Here…
Christian Faith and Friendship in the Academy
I thank the organizers for inviting me to discuss our theme, how Christian faith can inform friendships in the academy. As I begin, I would invite all…