Philosophy & Ethics

There have been increasingly violent attacks against scientists by animal rights activists in the last few years and partisan groups that can recite the name of every abortion provider killed by…

Mother Teresa said, “Suffering is a gift of God.” Well, it may be true that suffering tends to build character, but it also sometimes builds bitterness and criminals. In any case, we would naturally…

The other day I went to a talk about the fall and revival of metaphysics, given by Sebastian Kolodziejczyk at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Metaphysics these days has a bad…

Some of Hezbollah’s social institutions are functionally better than similar US institutions, and they function better because of science and our information age’s role in enhancing social, economic…

It is obvious that life is filled with choices and we often go to great lengths to explore different possible outcomes or scenarios when attempting to make decisions.  However what is choice and…

Being a skeptic is a rather lonely art. People often confuse you for a cynic, and I’m not using either term in the classical philosophical sense, of course. In ancient Greece, the cynics were people…

Years back, conversing with a now long-retired dean, I happened to let slip the words “common sense.” He replied, “It’s been a long time since I heard that phrase uttered on this…

    In December of 2006, two coinciding events occurred.  Saddam Hussein's death was youtubed and Bill Gates published an article in Scientific American called "A Robot in Every…

Informed consent is tricky business because there are disagreements about what informed consent can mean outside the country of the company conducting the trial and people will grant a lot of consent…

Scientists are often assumed to be obsessed by definitions. After all, if you cannot precisely define a concept, say what a planet is, or what a biological species is, you literally don’t…