Philosophy & Ethics

In America, science is as polarized as politics. Corporate scientists, like at pharmaceutical companies, are criticized for working at unethical companies while academic scientists are criticized for…

As a researcher in the fields of exact science and philosophy, I am obsessed with “truth”, which is a label of approval we assign to concepts that we judge to be consistent in a certain sense (…

In watching a recent discussion about "free will", I was surprised as to how quickly the discussion got confused by conflating "free choice" with "free will".[Day 2, Afternoon, First Session: …

Those who know the meaning of ‘third culture’, know that since the days when it was lamented that the members of the intellectual elite would not even know the second law of thermodynamics, the land…

If 41 percent of the human genome is covered by longer DNA patents that often cover whole genes, and so many genes share similar sequences within their genetic structure that if all of the "short…

Thomas Nagel wrote one lucky paper back almost half a century ago, titled “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?”.  That title went down so well, he has basically made a living from this alone ever since…

If you're a taxpayer in the UK, you get medical care for free - even if it's nothing at all. A survey  conducted by the Universities of Oxford and Southampton found that 97% of UK doctors…

The title should be: Reformulating the Postmodern Core Insight versus Consistency as Absolute Meta-Truth:  Last Bastion against New Totalitarianism - or some such, however, the software does not…

Damon Linker at theweek.com laments yet another new atheist manifesto, this time by British “philosopher” Grayling with his forthcoming book “The God Argument”.  Damon is looking for me it seems…

As readers of this blog know, I am not sympathetic to extreme reductionism, and reject both it and determinism in favor of a robust concept of emergence. Of course, I think a moderate epistemic…