A few weeks ago on The Public Discourse, Professor Anthony Esolen offered a fresh and creative criticism of Barack Obama’s now infamous “you didn’t build that” comment, challenging the President’s political statement with a largely metaphysical argument. However, my fear is that Professor Esolen’s argument may not appropriate a proper eye towards the political building […]
The purpose of this post is simple; to navigate through some of the different positions one could take regarding the ‘problem of free will‘. I’ve been asked by some to go over the basics, so, here it goes. I’ll define the major terms internal to the debate to give readers a bit more context and […]
The interconnection of neuroscience and free will has many researchers trying to make bold claims about their findings. In my last post I called Sam Harris’ conclusion that “free will is an illusion” into question. Specifically, I suggested that there were competing interpretations that could be made from the data that neuroscientist Benjamin Libet was […]
In his book ‘Free Will’ (2012) Sam Harris offers up the conclusion that “free will is an illusion”. I can’t say that I’m surprised given the fact that many neuroscientists have offered up similar responses to the free will problem (Libet 83′, 99′, 01′, 03′, among others) . But, falling in line with Libet and other neuroscientists […]
In a recent blog post in Scientific American the author, Larry Geenemeier, suggests that the accused Colorado Shooter was lacking cognitive control and points specifically to one’s cognitive ability in order to try to make sense of the actions in Aurora, Colorado and other recent events by similarly profiled assailants. Though I agree that we […]
By now, nearly everyone with access to this blog knows that SCOTUS has upheld the Obamacare bill. This has caused an uproar with Libertarian folks as well as those who might not call themselves Libertarians but who think gov’t telling them what they must buy is inappropriate. I’ll be discussing the objections levied by the […]
Antony Davies has recently given a really brief pod cast as to how the student loan crisis is similar and even worse to the housing bubble that popped a few years back (it’s worth a look, only 4 minutes long). I think he’s right that this is a major problem. He suggests (as do many […]
September 7, 2012
by Tak
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