Evolution and Theology

Posted on March 10, 2010
Filed Under Philosophy, Religion, Science | 26 Comments

Yes, I’m really behind on blog posts here. Sorry, I’ve been quite busy. Larval Subjects had an interesting post on theology and evolution. It’s primarily brief comments on Nagel, Fodor and Plantinga responding to Darwinism. However Levi raises a good critique I’ve heard both from more fundamentalist critics of evolution as well as atheists criticizing theism.
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The Island

Posted on March 4, 2010
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments

I haven’t had time to post much the last week. But I came upon a quote here I really wanted to pass along.

“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer of the shoreline of the wonder.” -Ralph W. Sockman.”

Philosophical Focus

Posted on February 25, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Philosophy | 2 Comments

I notice one other interesting thing at the materialism post at Larval Subjects. Levi says the following:

And moreover, as Graham likes to say, if you only ever find yourself talking about the human-world relation then you’re a correlationist. If your philosophy has nothing significant to say about the relation between a rock and soil, you’re a correlationist. At any rate, it seems to me that we’ve begun to use these terms very loosely.

I wonder, though, if this is fair. Of course much of this hinges on the notoriously enigmatic statement by Heidegger that things only “are” if there is Dasein. However I think the above also gets an other issue that bothers me somewhat. The difference between having a position and having a focus.


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Materialism and Idealism

Posted on February 24, 2010
Filed Under Peirce, Philosophy | 2 Comments

Sorry – haven’t had time to finish my other post. I did want to briefly common on a recent post of Levi’s on materialism and correleationalism. Levi notes that both are forms of reductionism.

“The variations of anti-realism all seek to reduce objects to some human related phenomenon, while the variants of materialism always seek to reduce objects to some identical material ’stuff.’”

Put an other way, both end up variations of nominalism. Either “structures” are due to human thought or else they are just an illusion and there is just the physical parts.


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Mormonism, Externalism and OOO

Posted on February 23, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Peirce, Religion | 3 Comments

I’d brought up at LDS-Herm my recent comments on Heidegger, Peirce and externalism. While this is one of those topics where there appears no over LDS connection I did find it interesting that this discussion was so close to topics I’ve been studying off and on for many years. In fact this blog got started way back on a similar topic. I collected a few of the posts into a rough quasi-theological outline of a topic on agency. I’d hoped to pull this together into a more robust form and make it a SMPT paper. However small kids and starting a new business sort of put an end to that idea – at least for a few years. (Although I am planning to be at the SMPT Conference on March 25 at UVU here in Orem)

I’d posted a few comments tying the above very rough thoughts to the recent controversy raging at many OOO and Heideggerian blogs. As I see it once you make the move to externalism then the issue of being manifesting through strife takes center stage. This is obvious in Heidegger with his notion of polemos. I think it pretty obvious with Peirce where Secondness (or the encounter with the Other) involves the Other battering down our ideas with the Real. (See my post from last week) Now the issue of violence will always be pertinent here precisely because of this sort of relation, as will the issue of justice and Ethics (in the Levinasian sense).


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More Against Correlationism

Posted on February 19, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Peirce, Philosophy | Leave a Comment

Just a quick followup on yesterday’s post on Kant, Heidegger, Peirce and externalism. This is from Gary Fuhrman’s paper I’d linked to in the sideblog earlier.
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Avoiding Correlationism

Posted on February 18, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Peirce, Philosophy | 8 Comments

Enowning linked today to Graham Harman explaining Meillassoux’s correlationism critique in Philosophy Today. I thought this would be a great place to engage Peirce and Heidegger with each other.

The critique is roughly a Kantian critique. To think things in themselves fails since to think of it immediately turns itself into something not itself. All that is left then is some correlation between the thing and thought.

Now Peirce famously rejects the notion of the Kantian thing-in-itself. Peirce claims that a realist like himself would “deny that there is any reality which is absolutely incognizable in itself, so that it cannot be taken into the mind” (CP 8.13)

Peirce has an extended critique of the Kantian position.


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Heidegger and Realism

Posted on February 16, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Philosophy | 4 Comments

Heidegger’s realism (or lack thereof) has been a topic of many blogs the past few weeks. Sadly it’s come right at what for me has been the second most busy time of the year. So other than the occasional comment at other blogs I’ve not said much. I still don’t really have time to say much, but perhaps I can chime in on a few things. Albeit briefly.

1/ Externalism. I think the big problem is that the traditional problem of realism is tied to the Cartesian divide. That is how this mind stuff, completely separate from other stuff, can have justified true beliefs about that other stuff. This is what leads to the particular kind of skepticism that Heidegger raises in Being and Time. When people raise the question of correlationalism or the like or tie Heidegger to Husserl or the neoKantians one must always keep in mind the issue of internalism vs. externalism. The argument in BT fundamentally is just recognizing that if one rejects the assumptions of internalism that one can’t even raise the skeptical claim. This doesn’t ground why one should be an externalist, but it’s impossible to raise many problems including correlationalism within externalism.


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Religious Belief & Reformed Epistemology

Posted on February 1, 2010
Filed Under Peirce, Philosophy, Religion | 3 Comments

One thing that many religious thinkers have appealed to in religious epistemology is the idea of reformed epistemology. This is roughly the idea that you can be justified in a belief without having the conditions of your justification before you. That is you can know without being able to give reasons for your knowledge. Now I’m amazingly skeptical of this approach, whether the form by Alston or Plantinga. I know some Mormon thinkers have at times embraced this. (I seem to recall Dennis Potter talking about this back in the 90’s, for instance)

The problem I have with this is that it seems to avoid the central issue of giving reasons. I think we can salvage the general principle though. In this month’s philosopher’s carnival Chris Hallquist has up a nice discussion of reformed epistemology and moral realism. I particularly like this passage:


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Vaccine Doctor Dismissal

Posted on January 29, 2010
Filed Under Politics, Science | 4 Comments

The doctor who perpetrated fraud regarding a vaccine link with Autism will finally be banned from medicine. Yes it’s not done yet, but it looks like it’ll happen soon. It’s hard to underestimate the damage to children this guy has done. Not to mention the irrational panic he’s caused in parents. Those parents who aren’t vaccinating are causing outbreaks of whooping cough, mumps and measles and other diseases. Not only that but it’s led to a general distrust of vaccines such that we saw many parents not vaccinating their kids this fall for swine flu. Speaking as someone who spent a few weeks in the hospital because of swine flu, I know just how terrible that is. (And, months after I came down with it prior to Thanksgiving I’m still on oxygen at night!)

I think even worse is that people like Andrew Wakefield have led to a general distrust of science. Some of the scandals in climate science (however overhyped and outright misrepresented by the media) have also contributed to this. All of this in turn has lead to a lot more people adopting pseudo-science like homeopathy. In some cases, such as some highly dangerous alternative treatments for autism, the treatments are far, far more dangerous than even any theoretical danger posed by purported mercury in vaccines. What’s worse is that people don’t apply the same skepticism they have of medicine to these alternative medicines.


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Dreyfus and Heidegger

Posted on January 23, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Philosophy | 5 Comments

Interesting post over at Minds and Brains. It makes a claim about Dreyfus that is intriguing. (Dreyfus of course has a well received commentary on Being and Time as well as a highly influential class at Berkeley on the same that many subscribe to via iTunes U)

…it is this feature of Heideggerian thought which led me to become dissatisfied with Hubert Dreyfus’ insistence that Dasein’s nonrepresentational and “non-mental” absorbed coping is the total story insofar as Dasein is average. On the contrary, as the rift-structure indicates, and as John McDowell attempts to demonstrate in Mind and World and in his recent exchange with Dreyfus in Inquiry, human experience is thoroughly “conceptualized” in terms of linguistic “object carving.”


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Thoughts on Derrida and Realism

Posted on January 18, 2010
Filed Under Derrida, Philosophy | Leave a Comment

I thought I was a bit alone in how I read Derrida. I always took him as a bit of a realist – although not a realist of the correspondence sort. That is he opposes the traditional story since Descartes of a clear inside and outside. In this story realism is an account of how thoughts in the inside correlate with objects in the outside. However I think Heidegger moves us away from that and Derrida even moreso with his criticism of the very inside and outside dichotomy.

I think Derrida’s early work on différance on up gets at this kind of deconstructive-realism.


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Chemistry Set Generation

Posted on January 16, 2010
Filed Under Politics, Science | 4 Comments

I, like many, was enraged by this ridiculous story about a school that evacuated due to a “bomb threat”. The threat? An 11 year old with a science project in a Gatorade bottle – a motion detector. All this reminds me of the good old days of the chemistry set generation.

Back when I was a young kid in the 70’s chemistry sets were actual chemistry sets. There were tons of experiments you could do. I think a lot of us went into science because of science sets like that. No longer. Not only can’t you buy them anymore but you’d probably be put in prison if you let your kid play with such chemicals. For that matter half the stuff you can’t even buy anymore.

Should Downs Syndrome Be Cured?

Posted on January 15, 2010
Filed Under Politics, Science | 15 Comments

The New York Times has up an editorial, “Should Downs Syndrome be cured?” Of course. This idea that debilitating problems in babies should be left because others have it is ridiculous. Guess what, if you spend your childhood battling cancer it’ll change your personality as well.

I think a lot of this sort of discussion comes out of (a) a nervousness to change what people perceive as God’s creation (b) a desire for parents to have kids like them (and with the same handicaps like blindness or deafness) (c) some idea of personality essentialism.

I think (a) is ridiculous as the cancer example demonstrates. A friend of mine had a baby born with a bad infection. Few would say we ought just leave it infected because of some religious belief. So why would we leaven blindness, deafness, Downs Syndrome, Autism or other such things alone?

I think (b) is pretty selfish and ridiculous as well. It’s often a way for people who feel discriminated against or unaccepted to make themselves more mainstream. But limiting your children’s options for that sort of political gain seems like a modern form of child sacrifice.

Finally (c) is ridiculous as well for the reasons I mentioned. Clearly part of our personality is genetic but a big part is environmental as well. Given that, how on earth can anyone hold to that sort of essentialism?

I think we do have to push for a more accepting society. However using disabled children who needn’t be disabled to bring that about is just the height of selfishness.

All that said I think people are putting the cart before the horse on this. “Cures” for forms of autism, Downs Syndrom and so forth are still iffy and at best a long ways off. Further, I think as a reality, few parents would leave their kids in those circumstances when they needn’t be. The bigger issue honestly is how parents pay for such treatments. I think society clearly would be better off if these things were covered by society.

Levinas, Heidegger & Objects

Posted on January 14, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Philosophy | Leave a Comment

Enowning linked to a post by dis|closure on “enjoying your objects.” It’s interesting as it raises one place where I think Levinas simply gets Heidegger wrong.

Levinas refutes the Heideggerian notion that the existents in our lives, whether they be bread, hammers, pens, etc. are simply tools, or “means of life.” Levinas claims that, though we might need such tools, they are actually enjoyed. This is the beginning of the concept he calls “living from…” Levinas claims, in opposition to the Heideggerian school of thought, that “existence is not exhausted by utilitarian schematism that delineates (existents) as having the existence of hammers, needles, or machines. They are always in a certain measure– and even the hammers, needles, and machines are objects of enjoyment…”


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