“You’re wrong; it’s not the same thing at all.” You press a friend on an inconsistency, some double standard that has him talking out of both sides of his mouth. He denies it and you’re left to wonder who’s right, him or you? Well of course it depends. Maybe he is being consistent and his…
When you gotta go, you gotta go. In the men’s room after Michael Behe’s opening talk at a recent intelligent design symposium a fellow lad-in-waiting mocked, “There’s an evolutionary explanation for this,” referring to the dozen of us on a line that stretched to the exit. “As long as they don’t have to explain anything…
Metanexus Sophia. 2004.10.11. 5,150 Words. ﾓPersons have an ultimate destination ﾖ a kind of union with the Absolute,ﾔ writes Eric Steinhart, Professor of Philosophy at William Paterson University. Steinhart offers a theory of immortality through bodily resurrection. In his words, ﾓI develop a theory of the resurrection body. I start with Hickﾒs theory that the…
It is possible that Russell Jacoby has me dead to rights. In his IMHO column in the Chronicle Review, dated January 11, 2008 (”Big Brains, Small Impact“), Jacoby reflects on the 20 years since the publication of his book, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. In sum, despite sometimes fair criticism, Jacoby…
The Explanation of Behavior. (Routledge and Paul Kegan, 1964)This was my doctoral dissertation. It was an all-out attack on psychological behaviorism, which tried to show that only muddled philosophical thinking could hide from its practitioners that their research program was reaching a dead-end. Hegel. (Cambridge University Press, 1975; various languages)This was an attempt to…
Reductionism as Philosophy Reductionism is a philosophical tenet which states that by analyzing a system to its ultimate component parts, we will be able to unravel it at deeper and deeper levels. It is the process of reducing any feature of the perceived world to its final elements with the hope of exposing all the…