Browsing All posts tagged under »Metaphysics«

Turning the Metaphysics of Race upside down: Questions for Biological Race Realists

April 27, 2018 by

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Does race exist? This is the core question in the metaphysics of race debate. In this blog post, I raise some questions to challenge a prominent view on this debate, namely, biological race realism. These challenges reveal how biological race realism is still underdeveloped and susceptible to many criticisms. As we’ll see, we can turn […]

Some Facts about Facts

January 26, 2017 by

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Facts about Facts Facts, and in particular “alternative facts”, have been in the news a lot this week, and for good reason (I toyed with calling this post “Facts: talking metaphysics to power”). I’ll have something to say about “alternative facts” later in the post, but first I’m going to talk about facts more generally, […]

Why is natural better? Or if it isn’t, why do people keep telling me that it is?

August 29, 2016 by

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 [Caution: this reads like a rant from an old curmudgeon, and so it may be helpful to you to just go ahead and imagine me sitting in my rocking chair on my front porch shouting out rhetorical questions…] Anyone who’s cared to listen to me over the last several years will know that I am […]

Barack Obama Is Not My Father: A Simple Argument Against Physicalism

March 26, 2016 by

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The following is a rather simple (simplistic?) argument against certain forms of physicalism*, specifically, those forms which identify the conscious mind with physical processes of the brain. The argument starts with the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals (thank you, Leibniz), which is usually uncontroversial: If A and B are one and the same thing, […]

Picked Last in (Meta) Phys-Ed

January 31, 2015 by

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“Hey, heads up, guys. Here comes Substance Dualism” If contemporary philosophy were a high school and theories were students, Substance Dualism would be the kid who has a reputation for bad breath, horrible fashion sense, a shady family history, and for saying gauche and tactless things on a regular basis. The cool kids wouldn’t be […]

The Importance of Free Will

June 29, 2013 by

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For those who think that a belief in free will is not that important I refer you to this excellent piece by Rebbeca Roach. I further some of the issues raised by Roach and will be posting on it soon, as soon as I get a draft of my candidacy complete which also happens to […]

Personal Identity: Who are you? What am I?

September 26, 2012 by

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Here, I’ll be discussing the problem of personal identity. My aim is to offer a brief historical account of the problem touching briefly on bodily identity followed by Hume’s take on it. ‘Psychological continuity theories’ (PCT) are most popular (Parfit, Noonan, etc.) but I won’t discuss the details of them in this post (maybe future […]

We Built This City

September 7, 2012 by

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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 ‘Free Will Problem’

August 13, 2012 by

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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 […]

Neuroscience and Free Will: New study debunks Libet’s interpretation

August 10, 2012 by

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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 […]

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