Category Archives: Philosophy

Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, addressed in a recent post, condenses many ideas that have already found their way into columns here in the last year or two, so I like him a lot. One such idea is the way in which perception itself, as opposed to merely the interpretation of perception, is theory-led (or paradigm-led, in his terms). He gives a number of examples in science in which it was simply impossible to see something under one paradigm that became impossible to miss under the new. For example, Aristotelian science saw swinging stones as a question about interrupted falling. Galileo, however, influenced by a century of … Continue reading →

I’ve mentioned Rupert Sheldrake in a few posts, and his name has come up in comments, usually with the slant, “He’s probably nuts, but there are more things in heaven and earth…” In retrospect I have underestimated the extent to which we nowadays live in intellectually muddied waters (even here one has had to learn that “scientifically discredited” may mean no more than “Jerry Coyne’s trolls scoff at it”). There’s a long and interesting interview with Sheldrake on Best Schools, which shows that he’s read and studied a lot more than many of his detractors. That doesn’t make him right in his theorising, but it does make him more worth … Continue reading →

There’s a thought-provoking podcast on Randal Rauser’s blog, featuring philosopher Michael Rea on naturalism. He starts by carefully defining “naturalism” in accordance with those who most espouse it in the academic literature (because it’s one of those words that has ended up meaning almost anything and everything). His main conclusion is hardly new – that naturalism, understood as the decision to accept as authoritative only scientific epistemology, cannot be justified by naturalism.