In an earlier entry, Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: Broadening Horizons of Reason, I quoted the entirety of a Vatican Information Service news article. I’ll quote a stretch of that article about Pope Benedict’s speech to a symposium of philosophers: “Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a [...]
I’ve just finished reading Roberto Torretti’s Relativity and Geometry, a somewhat demanding philosophical discussion of the foundational ideas of Einstein’s two theories of relativity. Over the course of the book, as he discussed those foundational ideas of relativity, he builds up to a conclusion which is true enough, but does beg some questions. He points [...]
So what freedom do we have when we’re strongly constrained by our genes and the rest of our body, by our upbringings and our social and political circumstances, by the very nature of space and time and causality? Whatever the result of the various debates about nature versus nurture, there are certainly some strong constraints [...]
After nearly two years of heavy-duty entries exploring ways of updating Thomistic existentialism to account for modern empirical knowledge, I’ve started to move on in some ways, continuing this general task but trying to reach deeper. Specifically, I’m struggling to learn more of modern physics that I might better tackle metaphysical issues of being and [...]
In my reviews of Gerd Gigerenzer’s Adaptive Minds, beginning with A Review of “Adaptive Minds: Part I”, I discussed Professor Gigerenzer’s analyses of the ‘discoveries’ in the latter half of the 20th century that human beings don’t think very clearly. Beginning in the 1950s or so, Economists and psychologists and others tested the common folk [...]