The difference between type C and type M arguments.

Kenan Malik takes strong exception against a European Court decision against stem cell research. One of the objections to judges weighing in on morality is that it abrogates to them an authority that is much more general.

About the intellectual career and peregrinations of Christopher Lasch ( Read more... )

Best footnote ever: a wonderful takedown of Sigmund Freud.

Heinrich Heine was the master of the put down.

Reminding ourselves of how academic scholastic Aristotelians responded to Galileo’s astronomical claims.

Nice post about problems in use of terms in argument.

About moral ontology.

Scott Adams on the knowledge that matters in spotting ( Read more... )

MQFF would be the Melbourne Queer Film Festival.

Once again, I appear to a Mint Pass boy, going to seven sessions. Two on Sunday: Making The Boys and The One; one on Monday: The Black Field (Greek/Turkish); one on Thursday: Handsome Harry; two on Friday: Le Fil (Tunisian) and House of Boys (Dutch); and one on the following Saturday: I love you ( Read more... )

N and I spent much of Australia Day working on the global history we are co-writing, derived in large part from years of presenting history to thousands of students. We now have a complete draft of Part I, though I will have to rewrite the Conclusion after N has gone through my edits on the Foreword, Introduction and Chapters 1 to 5. But I am now ( Read more... )

Tuesday night went to the opening of the exhibition of ancient coins at the Ian Potter Museum at Melbourne University, a guest of Allan S, one of our presenters ( Read more... )

Examining the concept of ‘fair’ via experimental economics.

Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1972 essay defending the 1968 Papal Encyclical Humanitae Vitae.

Making a good point about the problems of appealing to legal definitions to defend particular conceptions of marriage.

About horoscopes and how ambiguous statements encourage assent.

C.S.Lewis on the ( Read more... )

About reason being a tradition in Western thought.

Examining recent critiques of Hannah Arendt.

Sam Harris and Sean Carroll disagreeing over when you can infer an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Sean Carroll putting the case against. Which is the correct side of the argument: ‘oughts’ are always about preferred states of the world, and there is nothing ( Read more... )

A World Cup soccer illustration of the difference between rules and norms.

Arguing that line length shows a hidden symbolism in Plato’s texts.

Rumsfield and Keynes on probability and prediction.

About problems with models. Arguing that we cannot know that all models are false

Reviewing four books on evilAbout former Supreme Court Justice ( Read more... )

A song about cognitive bias.

A new word we need to start using. [Link corrected.]

Nice list of types of assertion. And orders of ignorance.

Thinking about the unpredictable future knowledge problem for utopian theorising.

Mapping arrogance and humility as a function of confidence and competence. Study of why the unskilled can be unaware of (pdf ( Read more... )

Tips for dealing with the “meta-bias” of not wanting to be wrong. Reasoning errors from cognitive biases: why smart people make dumb decisions.

About meditation, its nature and benefits:
Someone who claims to be serious about understanding the mind, but refuses to meditate I would dismiss as unserious. If this entails my dismissal as unserious of ( Read more... )