Will Wilkinson is a little snarky about it, but basically right: Freddie DeBoer’s post on naturalism and the skeptical conclusions that follow from it is fuzzy philosophy. (The Sam Harris TED talk he’s riffing on is worse, but that’s another story.)  Regular readers will recognize this as one of my minor obsessions, an instance of […]

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It’s been a while since we had a good blogmeme, but this past week a slew of my favorite writers have been playing the “name ten books that influenced you” game.  Scanning my shelf, the ones that jump out: Code — Lawrence Lessig I can trace my interest in most of the core issues I’ve […]

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A long New York Times profile this weekend advances the proposition that philosopher Robert P. George—whose work I first encountered back in college—is now “this country’s most influential Christian conservative thinker.” I have my doubts, but to the extent the profile itself helps make the claim more true, that’ll be welcome.  Andrew Sullivan argues—and I […]

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I’ve written about this at some length before, but I want to quickly repeat the point because I keep seeing reader submissions to Andrew Sullivan’s running colloquy on free will that make a point to the effect that, whatever the metaphysical truth of the matter, we all have this “illusion of free will,” and ordinary […]

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This is put a bit more bluntly than anything Hayek says, but I do think there’s a strand of it running through some of his arguments: What Rawls doesn’t see is how [a society based on the Difference Principle] would create conditions for an uncontrolled explosion of resentment: in it, I would know that my […]

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John Searle makes a game attempt to give an account—what Nozick would call a “philosophical explanation”—of how there could possibly be free will, of what it would have to look like if there were, in spite of all the familiar problems with the concept. He admits, frankly enough, that it is a loose and sketchy […]

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What can I say, despite myself, I’ve got a soft spot for the old Marxist.

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Will Wilson at Postmodern Conservative suggests that I must have an extraordinarily strong commitment to reductionism if I’m prepared to bite the bullet and accept the “no further fact” thesis about personal identity, which runs “contrary what every fiber of my being tells me.” Apparently my fibers sing a different tune, since I can’t say […]

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Most of Michael Sandel’s series Justice is now up and streaming for your viewing pleasure. In my wildest Tooth Fairy dreams, this show is more popular than American Idol and there are dozens of Twitter hashtags devoted to the issues in each episode that people are collectively mulling. It’s a wonderful introduction to serious moral […]

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Robin Hanson defends his enthusiasm for silicon immortality against an incredulous Bryan Caplan, whose “I refute it thus” one-ups Dr. Johnson’s stone-kicking with an imagined shotgun blast to the brainpan. I’m sympathetic to Hanson’s response, and I think Caplan’s position is mostly voodoo in philosophy drag, but let’s be clear that there are a couple […]

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