Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Let's say "anti-materialists" point to EPR effects  to try to demonstrate that materialism is an incomplete description of reality: E, P, and R devised their thought experiment precisely to show that the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is unsatisfactory, because it implies that "spooky action at a distance" exists, contradicting materialism (as it was then formulated). But when experiments seem to show that there is "spooky action at a distance," then materialists simply say, "OK, well then that is part of material reality as well." In other words, materialism is a completely non-falsifiable thesis, since: 1) To defease non-materialist ideas, materialists say, "Well, show me how (God / angels / spirits / the soul / etc. ) can show up in an empirical, measurable way." (We won't go into the matter of whether that is a good test for truth or not: let's just accept the materialists's challenge for argum...

Has been published at last . (This link will work for the first fifty readers, I believe.)

Boberooni has implied that I got a man crush on Scott Adams. I will admit that I have learned a lot from Adams about persuasion. But I'm not in love, no no ! Adams, is, for instance, a terrible philosopher. Consider this gem : "As a companion to what I said on the Rubin Report, here is more scientific evidence that we are not rational beings. We are beings who rationalize after the fact." The problem with this position ought to be obvious... but it isn't, I guess, if you are a terrible philosopher. If "we," taken as a blanket statement, are not rational beings, then who cares what the "scientific evidence" says: it is just more rationalization after the fact done by a bunch of irrational beings who happen to (irrationally) have gained the title of scientist. Or are scientists magical aliens who are somehow immune to the laws that rule the rest of our "dumb human brains" for which "data and logic just don't exist"...

Someone on my Facebook feed, who seems to be a fairly clever person (but not very wise), posted an essay in which she wrote, "Philosophy has now been totally subsumed by computer science." We come upon this sort of foolishness regularly: before computer science, philosophy was going to be totally subsumed by the physical sciences. It may be instructive to look at a couple of the problems with a view like this. First of all, her statement itself is quite obviously not a finding of computer science! Computer science doesn't even contain a category called "philosophy," and so also can't contain any statements about philosophy. Computer science studies algorithms, and there is no possibility that the study of algorithms, however wonderful or brilliant those algorithms are, can reveal anything about subject A being subsumed by subject B, since computer science knows nothing of "subjects" or what it might mean for one to "subsume" anothe...

"Ideology is existence in rebellion against God and man. It is the violation of the First and Tenth Commandments, if we want to use the language of Israelite order; it is the nosos , the disease of the spirit, if we want to use the language of Aeschylus and Plato. Philosophy is the love of being through love of divine Being as the source of its order. The Logos of being is the object proper of philosophical inquiry; and the search for truth concerning the order of being cannot be conducted without diagnosing the modes of existence in untruth. The truth of order has to be gained and regained in the perpetual struggle against the fall from it; and the movement toward truth starts from a man’s awareness of his existence in untruth." -- Israel and Revelation , ix-xiv

My friend Joe Jordan, after reading my post on "Religion and Ideology," sent me the following, which I post with his permission: I bring this up in my political theory courses to differentiate between philosophy and ideology. I hate it when people talk about having a "philosophy" as if it were a method of fixing a flat tire while pulled over on the side of the road. To keep "philosophy" pure from ideology, I present the following dichotomies: Philosophy: Involves humble personalities Begins in wonder Open-minded Involves dialogue / hence republican Ever-differentiating Asks questions Seeks truth Ideology: Involves vainglorious personalities Begins in assumed certainty Close-minded Involves dictation / literally dictatorship Attempts a one-size-fits-all explanation of reality / reductionistic Avoids questions / Asserts ready-made "answers" Seeks power A very rough sketch, of course. The battle between Socrates and Thrasymach...

I picked this book up at a used bookstore chiefly because of the chapter on Berkeley, but I have been perusing other sections as well. The book is somewhat infamous in its ahistorical approach to the history of philosophy. George Boas said of it: " A History of Western Philosophy errs consistently in this respect. Its author never seems to be able to make up his mind whether he is writing history or polemic.... [Its method] confers on philosophers who are dead and gone a kind of false contemporaneity which may make them seem important to the uninitiate. But nevertheless it is a misreading of history." In other words, Russell failed to place the ideas of past philosophers in their historical context, a significant flaw in many interpretations of Berkeley (as my forthcoming paper points out), and certainly a major failing in a book with "history" in its title. While flipping through it, I found this little gem: "In the general decay of civilization that...

"The embarrassment in which [Pareto] is thus placed illustrates what I wanted to emphasize in maintaining that the type of problem with which he is here concerned belongs more properly to philosophy than it does to science. This has to do with the peculiar sense in which philosophy is uncommitted enquiry. I noted in the first chapter how philosophy is concerned with elucidating and comparing the ways in which the world is made intelligible in different intellectual disciplines; and how this leads on to the elucidation and comparison of different forms of life. The uncommittedness of philosophy comes out here in the fact that it is equally concerned to elucidate its own account of things; the concern of philosophy with its own being is thus not an unhealthy Narcissistic aberration, but an essential part of what it is trying to do. In performing this task the philosopher will in particular be alert to deflate the pretensions of any form of enquiry to enshrine the essence of intell...

The greatest philosopher of all Plato, knew this quite well, which is why he gave us so many myths: Atlantis, the ship of state, the cave and the light, the republic itself, the ring of invisibility -- you did know Gollum was right out of Plato, didn't you? -- the spherical beings who split into "soul mates," the myth of the afterlife at the end of Phaedo, and more. J.R.R. Tolkien, who is not usually recognized as a brilliant theologian, was one, I think, so brilliant that he can only set down his insights as myths... which is just why he is not recognized as a brilliant theologian. And my "presentism," as some have called my noting that the past and future only exist in a subsidiary fashion to the present, must ultimately be explained mythologically as well, which is why, when pushed about what I am really trying to say, I respond, "Go read the 'Music of the Ainur .'" (And for those of you who have "no time" for that -- it is on...

It is an interesting pattern that I've seen repeated a few times. Someone with no experience in or willingness to learn philosophy nevertheless ventures out upon the philosophical sea . A real philosopher takes a look at his work, and notes it is terrible philosophy . At that point, the lightweight often pulls this move : "The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it 'moronic' and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless." OK, Professor Krauss, if philosophy is boring and useless, why did you bother writing a book centered around a (very bad) philosophical theory? Why did philosophy only become boring and useless once it turned out that you are awful at it?