Adding philosophical depth to anything and everything
Since the time of Francis Bacon in the 1500s, science had been defined by inductive reasoning. This inductive scientific method — still largely in use today — gathers observational data, develops hypotheses that match patterns in the data, verifies the hypotheses through more observation, and then settles on a theory from which science can […]
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David Hume was a Scottish philosopher in the mid 1700s. His philosophy was a culmination of British empiricism. This was a tradition that began with Francis Bacon and continued through Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and then was critiqued rather effectively by George Berkeley. Berkeley had said that it is […]
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I received a letter (yes, some people still send paper letters!) that contained a lovely quote from Max Planck. A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die. Perhaps Planck was being metaphorical about “dying,” […]
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Text transcript, lightly edited for readability. Douglas Giles The topic of Artificial intelligence, or AI, has been all over the news lately, quite often discussed with a sense of foreboding doom and a plea for someone to do something to save us from the effects of AI. Much of […]
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One of my favorite historical stories is that of miasma theory. It is also known as the theory that bad air causes disease. The scientific word “miasma” comes from ancient Greek and means “pollution.” More common usage adopted the medieval Italian word “malaria,” meaning “bad air.” As you probably have […]
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I ran across this quote years ago and yesterday’s discussion with my students in ethics class brought it to mind. “Perspective shifts will unlock more than smartness will.” – Dr. Astro Teller There is wisdom in this quote, but like all wisdom, it has to go deeper than a slogan […]
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Video Version Philosopher Thomas Kuhn argued that science is “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions” in which “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962) The longer-lasting, more tranquil periods of “normal science” are guided by a dominant paradigm. Astrophysics […]
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Peirce (1839-1914) developed the basic idea of pragmatism as a method for improving the accuracy of science in its search for truth. His father was a mathematician on faculty at Harvard University. This enabled the younger Peirce to get his own education at Harvard and to meet a number of […]
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In philosophy, there is a divide between continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. Some people say that this isn’t really a divide, it’s just a different approach that creates the divide. Some analytic philosophers are fond of saying that they work within the analytic tradition, and the word “tradition” is very […]
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For several decades, French philosopher Henri Bergson (1856–1941) was probably the most famous philosopher in the world. He is now tragically largely forgotten because his work is incorrectly dismissed as mere speculation because it is not reducible to the methods of analytical philosophy. Bergson, similar to G.W.F. Hegel, thought of […]
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