8 philosophical questions that we’ll never solve? “Philosophy goes where hard science can’t, or won’t. Philosophers have a license to speculate about everything from metaphysics to morality, and this means they can shed light on some of the basic questions of existence. The bad news? These are questions that may always lay just beyond the limits of our comprehension.” But is this bad news? Do you really want to have the answers? Not if that would mean the end of philosophizing!
P2: What can I know?
The world is made of fire
21st Century Monads song with lyrics based on Heraclitus. From the new album Interlocutor.
Has a Manhattan jeweler explained everything?
David Birnbaum and his Summa Metaphysica. “David Birnbaum made his fortune selling jewellery to movie stars. Now he has published a ‘remarkable and profound’ investigation into the origins of the universe. Is there any reason to take it seriously? … Is it still conceivable – as it was a century ago – that a gentleman amateur, with some financial resources, could make a real, revolutionary contribution to our understanding of the mysteries of the universe? There is no shortage of people who would say no, at least in Birnbaum’s case.”
Spinoza and Leibniz
Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic is about Leibniz (the courtier) and Spinoza (the heretic). It is a superb introduction to their ideas and also an exciting story. As Liesl Schillinger put it in Great Minds Don’t Think Alike, a book review in the New York Times, “With ‘The Courtier and the Heretic,’ Stewart has achieved a near impossibility, creating a page-turner about jousting metaphysical ideas that casts the hallowed, hoary thinkers as warriors in a heated ideological battle.” This book review, along with Mad, bad and dangerous to know – it can only be a philosopher and Of miracles and monads, will give you a good idea of Stewart’s book and of Spinoza’s and Leibniz’s ideas.
The moon illusion
The moon’s appearance and reality explained … or not.
The Afterlife
Samuel Scheffler on the importance of the afterlife … seriously. “Astonishing though it may seem, there are ways in which the continuing existence of other people after our deaths — even that of complete strangers — matters more to us than does our own survival and that of our loved ones.”
What is time?
Reviews of Lee Smolin’s Time Reborn. See especially Tensers, Time Regained!, and Resetting the Clocks, Smolin explains: “I used to believe in the essential unreality of time. Indeed, I went into physics because as an adolescent I yearned to exchange the time-bound, human world, which I saw as ugly and inhospitable, for a world of pure, timeless truth…. I no longer believe that time is unreal. In fact I have swung to the opposite view: Not only is time real, but nothing we know or experience gets closer to the heart of nature than the reality of time.” Even the laws of nature, Smolin says, are in time and change over time.
Analytic theology
The problems and questions discussed in analytic philosophy of religion. “… videos … shot during an international philosophy conference on “Minds – Human and Divine” in Munich 2012.”
Socratically Speaking 