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Useless Arithmetic and Inconvenient Truths
A review of Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future by Orrin H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, Columbia University Press, 2007. My story begins with the intriguing title of a new book — Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future (Pilkey 2007). The authors are a father and daughter team. The father is Orrin H. Pilkey, […] -
Eating Well Together: Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto
"When Species Meet" is a continuation and enlargement of Donna Haraway’s previous book. Both are efforts to do philosophy on the boundaries where species interact and to explore the complex relations between humans and animals. -
Resources and Problems in Whitehead’s Metaphysics
His process metaphysics tends to depersonalize God to the extent of rendering theism irrelevant and naturalize moral evil in the service of evolution. -
(D)evolving Catholic Perspectives on Creation
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 or give any details,” another […] -
H-: Engaging Transhumanism: A Critical Historical Perspective
Technology is transforming human life at a faster pace than ever before. The convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, information and communication technology, and applied cognate science poses a new situation in which the human has become a design project. The new technologies allow for new kinds of cognitive tools that combine artificial intelligence with interface technology, molecular biology, and nanotechnology; […] -
Universalism and Particularism: Judaism in an Age of Science
A review of Norbert M. Samuelson, Jewish Faith and Modern Science: On the Death and Rebirth of Jewish Philosophy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.) Modern Jews are torn between the particularist teachings of their religious tradition and the universalist aspirations of science (or maybe they should be more so). Of course, other religious traditions face similar challenges. Science undermines […]