People have always sought the highest Good in life. Epicureanism was one of the philosophical streams that had an important influence on the Western tradition of thought. This conception stresses that the highest Good in life is pleasure and the highest evil is pain. While maintaining this, it avails of some arguments that it takes …
‘Effectively, Catholicism lost its moral authority the minute it mixed epistemic and pisteic belief — breaking the link between holy and the profane.’ —writes Nassim Nicholas Taleb, on Medium in his article On Christianity. I think that there is enough space here for some nuances. Modern science did not appear from anywhere but was itself …
It is the easiest thing in the world to believe in God. We are facing an infinite universe that works like a clock. You can then deduce that the clock must have had a clock-maker. And there you are: now you have a God, i.e., an infinite active intelligence. This is the short form of …
Nowadays, there is a prevailing view that human knowledge is rooted in the biological needs of our animal ancestors. However, we must emphasize that such a biological rooted ‘knowledge’ has a specificity which, perhaps, was not sufficiently questioned until now: it is embodied knowledge. An animal, to fear something, must first recognize it as dangerous …
Why does hypnosis work? Although hypnotic suggestion is not very different from any other human communication, it can have tremendously different consequences. How can the hypnotist possibly make you behave differently than you expect yourself to do? A hypnotic suggestion is nothing more than a statement requiring you to do something. For example, lets’ suppose …
What is time? Saint Augustine, in antiquity, said that if no one asked him about the nature of time, he knew what time was. However, when someone asked him what time was, he could no longer answer that question. Apart from being only a rhetorical paradox, Saint Augustine’s words express our deep discomfort concerning such …
What does natural science do when interpreting human consciousness? It attempts to interpret it as a consequence or effect of the complex system that the brain is. In other words, it tries to obtain the mental state from the state of the brain and of the human body in general, similarly to how Laplace’s demon …
Science cannot even start its investigation without presuming the existence of free will, in the same way in which the principles of mechanics cannot ignore all the meanings present in the term ‘force’ related to the human force exerted in our daily experiences. Thus what science does in the case of free will is only …
Like any other type of knowledge, science uses metaphors in its discourse. ‘Attraction,’ ‘repulsion,’ ‘force,’ ‘energy’ – all these fundamental scientific concepts are metaphors; that is to say, they are terms borrowed from other domains where they had a meaning related to human experience which is now translated into domains that are foreign to that …
In Hegel, self-externality of space is only a logical condition for everything that exists. As logical, it concerns pure possibility and not reality. Space is everywhere opening itself into other self-external spatial contents. The difficulty of understanding Hegel in his explanations concerning nature is that we tend to understand the concepts about which he speaks …