“Larvae, the immature forms of many animals, are distinct from adult forms by definition. In many life histories–caterpillars and the trochophore larvae of clams and sea snails are examples–larvae and adults bear no resemblance to each other. Biologist Donald I. Williamson has proposed that larvae are juvenile forms acquired through hybridization–the fusing of two genomes, … [Read more…]
Over the past decade or more, neuroscientists have found strong evidence that we start to act before we’re consciously aware of our own actions. This is a problem to those who believe in free-will in the sense of a power of an autonomous agent. It isn’t much of a problem to one who accepts the … [Read more…]
As my allergies ease and I get over a funk about the decrepit state of the ‘Catholic mind’ in recent centuries, I’m starting to clear out some old business and getting ready to move on to new business including regular commentary upon issues being raised by modern researchers in the various fields of empirical knowledge. … [Read more…]
Recent centuries have seen a mysterious retreat from the mainstream of modern thought on the part of Catholic clergymen and also Catholic laymen whose intellectual work is oriented directly to the needs of Christianity. I’m far from being a well-read historian but I’ve read enough survey works to see the retreat of Catholic thinkers into … [Read more…]
While reading, Ernst Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, I realized I’ve been guilty of a major oversight in my discussions of ‘hellenistic metaphysics’. Cassirer doesn’t speak much of Christianity or the Church in that book, but he does speak of swings between various forms of Hellenistic metaphysics. And there are indeed … [Read more…]
I have put a completed book, not published in paper, on this website for free downloading. I’ve only put an informal copyright and no legally binding license on the work. See Unpublished Books for Download for details.
In the December, 2007 edition of Brain in the News published by the Dana Foundation, there is a reprint of an article from Salon.com: I Feel Your Pain. It seems that specific brain-cells have been found which respond to distress on the part of a nearby creature. True pain is felt. What is empathy? It’s … [Read more…]
We can’t visualize Heaven, that is, the world in which the resurrected will live with the Lord Jesus Christ for time without end, but we need to try just because of the sorts of creatures we are. We’re flesh-and-blood creatures needing images to believe in the reality of a place or an entity, yes, even … [Read more…]
The [dogmatic] declarations [of the early Church] were uttered in the language of Greek philosophy because the false statements were uttered in that language. [The Power and the Wisdom, John L. McKenzie, S.J., The Bruce Publishing Company, 1965, page 129] The opponents of the Church, both the ones with good intentions and the hateful ones, … [Read more…]
Way back in the mid-1970s before the sexy term ‘chaos theory’ had ever driven books onto the best-seller lists, I took a course with a decidedly unsexy title: The Qualitative Analysis of Ordinary Differential Equations. In that course, we learned how to analyze potentially unstable systems such as a planet orbiting the sun so that … [Read more…]