One must grant a belated happy birthday to David Hume (May 07, 1711), one of history’s most insightful thinkers and a favoured philosopher of mine despite the conservatism that is often associated with him. Gottlieb, in a timely review of a new intellectual biography of Hume, observes, “in 2009, he […]
The concept of the multiverse takes advantage of two principles, namely the Copernican Principle and the Anthropic Principle. This is intriguing for Carter introduced the Anthropic Principle as a reaction to the Copernican Principle. The Copernican Principle states that the Earth, Sun, humans, life, do not occupy a special or […]
I myself after the handing down of a federal budget like to focus on the macroeconomic discussion and projections that appear in the budget papers, of which I will have more to say in the coming days. I like to do this because the macroeconomic discussion and projections can provide […]
Hitherto, among serious analysts, two major technical limitations have been seen as characterising North Korea’s strategic programme. The first is the drive to develop a nuclear warhead of relatively low throw weight, light enough for an ICBM programme and even light enough for use against South Korea and Japan. North […]
The problem of political obligation is a, if not the, central issue of political philosophy. The problem is to offer rational justifications for the state in the face of the philosophical anarchist charge that authority is not self justified. If philosophical anarchism is correct, as it surely is, any system […]
One thing that interests me is the question of anomalies and the structure of scientific revolutions as per Thomas Kuhn. We tend to associate anomalies and revolutionary science with the physical sciences, most especially physics. This is unsurprising because ours is a society where physics has become the queen of […]
The New York Times carries a thought provoking op-ed by William Gail on what he refers to as a looming new scientific dark age. Let us put aside the quibble that the dark ages might not have been as dark as commonly supposed. Gail makes the argument that as global […]
One often comes across many “just so stories” in the context of human evolution. One field that has, or perhaps had, almost turned this into an art form is evolutionary epistemology. Take say the following just so story, typical of the genre, which is applicable to logic. We assume that […]
What is happening in France is a delight to witness. Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados of Spain, and now Nuit debout in France has recrystallised the opposition to neoliberal globalisation in the West after the movement’s post 9/11 dormancy. The crafting of a new world beyond corporate globalisation, beyond capitalism […]
The mind-body problem we are familiar with, so let us not tally with this too much; at least, not yet. There is another problem of body, most famously formulated by Eugene Wigner, in his oft cited paper on the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in the physical sciences. How comes it […]
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