Concept tag
#naturalism
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Reading group: Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (2001), from plants and wolves to people
I coached rugby for thirty years, and every season there was one boy who never tackled. He was fast, he scored, and the team was worse for having him. I never had the words for what was wrong with him beyond “he's…
Started by Gerrit VenterReply first (no replies yet) -
Plantinga’s proper function: does warrant need a designer, or will evolution do?
This term a student asked me a question I could not answer cleanly, so I bring it here. Alvin Plantinga's account of warrant, in Warrant and Proper Function (1993), says roughly that a belief has warrant if it is produced by cognitive…
Started by Ikechukwu AnyanwuAnswer first (no replies yet) -
Naturalisms before the word: the Cārvākas, Wang Chong and Xunzi’s Heaven
I want to test the distinction this site keeps drawing between kinds of naturalism (ontological, methodological, ethical, epistemological) against three older figures who are often lumped together as "early naturalists". The Cārvākas (Lokāyata). Almost all of their own texts are lost; we…
Started by Arvind PoojaryReply first (no replies yet) -
Wang Chong against the omen-readers: a naturalist in the Han dynasty
Among the classics my father left me is one I did not expect to enjoy. Recently I have been reading Wang Chong's Lunheng, and I think he deserves to be far better known outside China. In the Han dynasty a powerful theory…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
There can be no laws of human behaviour, only useful regularities
The "law" of demand is not a law in the sense the law of gravitation is, and I have said so to every new analyst I have trained. Here is the thesis in full. Social science finds regularities. Some are robust: Ibn…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Brute facts are not a cop-out: some things just are, and the universe may be one of them
When I talk with believers in the villages where our association works, the conversation often reaches this point: "But who made the universe? Everything has a cause." When I say the universe may simply exist, with no further explanation, I'm told I…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies