Pierre-Normand

I am not a Catholic either, not even a Christian (and not even a theist, for that matter, although I am certainly not a militant atheist). I've read l...

I quite enjoyed the piece. It's enlightening and thought provoking. The sort of neither relativist nor absolutist conception of pluralistic 'nations' ...

When I was a physics student, in the mid 90s, I had been quite seduced by Deutsch's arguments in favor the MWI interpretation of QM. That was before h...

Here is the Rovelli interview that I was thinking of. While searching for it I also happened on this.

Interesting review. Voit ends up with acknowledging the relevance of Zurek's work on decoherence for the measurement problem in QM. Coincidentally, I ...

Agreed. Nine years ago I wrote a paper (unpublished) on the topic of autonomy in which I distinguished four grades of autonomy, whereby each one reali...

Yes, I'm quite happy that you brought up the issue of the contextual character of causation. I was thinking about it while writing my post but decided...

Mental causation is such a widespread phenomenon that one hardly needs to appeal to such things as the placebo effect to exemplify it. I decide to rai...

@"Wayfarer" By the way, Babatte Babich mentions in her preface to Heelan's book the hard time that she had had bringing to fruition an event with Pete...

@"Wayfarer" Yes, we might say that eliminativists (and reductionists) about the mental, about consciousness, or about subjective experience, are "deni...

I had recommended those four emergence-themed blog posts when I had had my extended debate regarding reduction and emergence on this forum last year. ...

@"Wayfarer" Thanks for linking to this. It was instructive but almost painful to read (as is, elsewhere, Strawson's uninspired defense of hard-determi...

No apologies needed. As usual, your posts need being given quite a bit of thought before one can reply to them meaningfully. Have you read the paper b...

Either that or Cretaceous bees were mighty big buggers.

Not everything that can be counted ______, and not everything that counts can be ______.

I like your narrative style. It reminds me of this.

What you quoted Crowther to be saying and what @"StreetlightX" had said seem to be broadly compatible ideas applied to different contexts. Streetlight...

She is the one. Her only paper that I read is Decoupling Emergence and Reduction in Physics, but it has been extremely enlightening. I've mentioned he...

I just read it too. Anderson doesn't define very clearly what he takes reductionism to amount to, or what analysis is. His examples illuminate what he...

No, of course not. It's not a good reason all things considered. All things considered, Peterson's calls for action only are worthy of being ignored. ...

Maybe because of its lopsidedness? I think the piece is informative in identifying most of the unsavory strands in Peterson's thinking and many of his...

Bugger... Whenever I'm trying to look away from the Peterson circus and keep to more serious readings, one of those crop up.

You can read the third chapter -- Two Cheers for Reductionism -- in Steven Weinberg's book Dreams of a Final Theory, for an instance of such an argume...

I only read half of Meeting the Universe Halfway, a few years ago, not because it's not good -- it's excellent -- but because of time constraints. I'l...

Until just a few years ago I tended to share this judgement about the (lack of significant) philosophical significance of quantum mechanics. There is ...

Very nice OP, and thanks for the links to the texts by P. W. Anderson; by Noah Moss Brender; and by R. B. Laughlin and David Pines. I now know what I'...

It's happened already! The long anticipated Peterson-Žižek debate occurred.

@"csalisbury" Fair enough. For the time being, I am happily agnostic (because ignorant) regarding the notion of grace. So, modulo that, we indeed may ...

I agree. I am very much a neo-Aristotelian about practical reason. Hence, on my view, ethical motivation is grounded in virtue of character and the "s...

Yes, they need to be criticized in the same way. Scientists are just as likely to be ideologically biased as any other kinds of intellectuals.

No, the exact opposite, actually. When natural scientists talk about the climate, they have a tendency to be informed about this particular topic (alt...

I have a somewhat different take on this. I am mostly relying on Kant's discussion of causation in the Third Antinomy. As an embodied agent, the self ...

Maybe you'll enjoy, if you haven't read them already: Atheism Considered as a Christian Sect and (recommended by darthbarracuda, recently): A Short Hi...

Yes, I agree. No contest there.

Yes, he may not be saying those things explicitly. That had struck me as being implicit, maybe, because he is clearly lamenting the lack of *something...

Yes, I also understood this to be the point of the author. There are good (needed) and bad (obfuscatory) uses of jargon. But good uses of jargon often...

Yes, Peterson often does 'postmodernism' without being aware of it rather in the way Monsieur Jourdain was unknowingly talking prose. The pragmatist a...

Thanks. I very much like this concluding sentence. It also highlight the never-ending character of genuine philosophical inquiry as well as that of se...

That's true. In another video with Stefan Molyneux, who also is a libertarian alt-right guru, they lament how tragic it is that mainstream academia do...

It's good, not excellent. I broadly agree with Baden's assessment. It succeeds best in exposing Peterson's rhetorical tricks and his methods for conce...

Thanks for drawing attention to it. It's pretty good, and spot on, if only, maybe, a bit too unrestrained (in respect of style, not content). As a gen...

Indeed, the variable Milankovitch forcing explains the slow and regular Holocene cooling trend that has occurred since the Holocene Climatic Optimum, ...

While I agree that the occurrence of the prediction, and the presentation of its putative content to the agent, take away nothing from the agent's fre...

The trouble is that people don't usually go around qualifying other people's behaviors as "normal" or "abnormal" in a totally dispassionate and/or mer...

This is tricky. What you mean to say, possibly, is that the description of what it is that you are determined to do (actually, given "the past" and th...

It is true, as some have mentioned already, that the AGW-skeptical movement (that is, people skeptical of the anthropogenic contribution to recent and...

Yes, I think there is some degree of confusion, left and right. Left because people who are socially progressive aren't always philosophically literat...

@"Noble Dust" Awesome! Thanks!

https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/292/buxtebuddha test No, I meant in a thread. See, I just tried to refer to you above. It didn't work out as I ...

What do I do when I want to flag a user's name (so that they will receive a notification and there appears a link to their profile) in a new message a...