In reading Richard Gregory’s Mind in Science, I find that he raises a seemingly plausible objection to those thinkers who `regress’ to seeing abstractions, including knowledge, in the objective world. He states his objection in a short and loaded way: [The psychologist Kenneth] Craik is suggesting that human inference has its validity and logical power … [Read more…]
Love is probably undefinable but we can at least understand some aspects of that love and can probably come to a substantial narrative understanding of some loves in their specific contexts. We can maybe even understand some of the ways in which a truer and incorruptible love will make the world of the resurrected, heaven, … [Read more…]
In Do We Survive the Major Transformations of Our Lives?, I wrote: In Rewriting the Soul, the philosopher Ian Hacking had speculated that the multiple personality phenomenon is a largely learned strategy of segregating painful memories. Is our sense of a particular individuality tied that strictly to specific memories? But our memories would not seem … [Read more…]
Let me state a certain political position as: The United States of America are but Massachusetts is. This is a grammatical statement of the classic States’ rights doctrine which was one of the matters so violently dealt with in the American war between the states. It was, in fact, a matter of contention from the … [Read more…]
I stretch the truth when I sometimes talk as if I were the only one who sees being as a spectrum from the abstract to the concrete. Clearly, there is a sense in which Platonic and Neoplatonic Realists see being in two forms, abstract being (what they call the Real) and concrete being (the real … [Read more…]
The main point of this article, Put Down That Game Controller: Researcher Suggests Video Games May Not Boost Cognition, is that we should pay attention to the ways in which social scientists recruit participants in their study. The argument is that earlier researchers claiming to find improvements in such attributes as hand-eye coordination from frequent … [Read more…]
I’ve started rereading Science and Creation by John Polkinghorne, the physicist at Cambridge University who left his professorship to enter an Anglican seminary before returning to Cambridge as a chaplain and administrator. Father Polkinghorne is quite polite to those who denigrate natural theology and to those who simply question what natural theology can really tell … [Read more…]
In a prior weblog posting, Intentionality as the Guide to Philosophical Thinking, I discussed this quote: I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton] I write often about my efforts to find … [Read more…]
[The original version of this essay was published at The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 5. The Einsteinian Universe. It was finished and uploaded on 2007/02/24. This version includes some changes made for the approaching publication of a collection of most of my weblog entries over the past 5+ years.] Einstein gave a great … [Read more…]
As I read books on mathematics and science, I’m always thinking of issues in theology and metaphysics and politics and history. My inclination, whatever works I produce as byproducts, is to absorb knowledge as if it were background knowledge for a novelist. This doesn’t mean ‘research’ that will produce reliable historical novels but rather the … [Read more…]