Why fish (likely) don’t feel pain

by Brian Key What’s it feel like to be a fish? I contend that it doesn’t feel like anything to be a fish.  Interestingly, much of our own lives are led without attending to how we feel. We just get on with it and do things. Most of the time we act like automatons. We …

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The World’s Greatest Living Philosopher

by Robert Nola The French Philosophe Alain Badiou gave a lecture at Auckland University in December 2014 entitled “À la recherche du réel perdu: In search of the lost real.” The full talk is on YouTube [1]. We are lucky to present here extracts from the diary which he kept while in New Zealand and …

The Peer-to-Peer Hypothesis and a new theory of free will

by Marcus Arvan [This essay is part of a special “free will week” at Scientia Salon. The Editor promises not to touch the topic again for a long while after this particular orgy, of course assuming he has any choice in the matter…] Nick Bostrom [1] is well-known for arguing on probabilistic grounds that we are …

Free Will, the Basics

by Massimo Pigliucci [This essay is part of a special “free will week” at Scientia Salon. The Editor promises not to touch the topic again for a long while after this particular orgy, of course assuming he has any choice in the matter...] Sometimes it’s good, or even necessary, to go back to the basics. …

Choosing a compatibilist free will perspective

by Dwayne Holmes [This essay is part of a special “free will week” at Scientia Salon. The Editor promises not to touch the topic again for a long while after this particular orgy, of course assuming he has any choice in the matter…] Despite the question having been around forever, the topic of Free Will …

Quantum mechanics and scientific realism

by Quentin Ruyant One of the main tasks of philosophy is to clarify conceptual problems and sketch the landscape of possible solutions to these problems. Of course, individual philosophers often tend to defend specific positions, but what emerges at the level of the community is, generally, a landscape of possibilities. Take, for example, the question …

Cosmic evolution and the meaning of life

by John G. Messerly [The following is an excerpt from The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Transhumanist, and Scientific Perspectives, Darwin & Hume Publishers, 2013] Are there trends in evolution — cosmic, biological, and cultural — that support the claim that life is meaningful, or is becoming meaningful, or is becoming increasingly meaningful? Perhaps there …

Reductionism, emergence, and burden of proof — part II

by Marko Vojinovic In part I of this essay I have introduced and discussed the idea of reductionism from an epistemological point of view. In what follows we will go one step further, and discuss the idea of ontological reductionism [15]. However, much of what follows will be actually devoted to rewriting the discussion of …

Reductionism, emergence, and burden of proof — part I

by Marko Vojinovic Introduction Every now and then, the question of reductionism is raised in philosophy of science: whether or not various sciences can be theoretically reduced to lower-level sciences. The answer to this question can have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of science both as a human activity and as our vehicle to gain …

APA 2014-5: On the Reality of Atoms and Subatomic Particles

by Massimo Pigliucci This is going to be my last report from the 2014 meetings of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. Obviously, it has been a rather idiosyncratic set of choices, reflecting my own interests, not necessarily the (much) broader scope of the meeting. Now if I could only convince some of …