Everyday Philosophy You hear a lot in apologetics about how if the materialist image of the world favoured by the likes of Richard Dawkins was true, there would be no room in reality for human free will. But why exactly is this? What’s the nature of the tension between free will and scientific materialism, and…
Everyday Philosophy In my first year of university, the study of philosophy was divided into three subtopics. There were lectures and classes in logic, ethics, and then ‘general philosophy’ which was supposed to include everything else. I showed up to my first lecture in the latter as a fresh-faced undergraduate eager for knowledge, and left…
Everyday Philosophy Imagine two firefighters. Lynda regularly puts herself in danger, entering burning buildings to perform difficult rescues that others are too afraid to. Lynda isn’t reckless: she’s extremely competent and only tries rescues that she thinks have a good chance of success. But she is fearless, or close to it: fear for her is…
Everyday Philosophy Much philosophical discussion about lying has tended to focus on the most extreme of extreme cases. “Is it acceptable to lie to a murderer about whether or not his would-be victim is in your house?” As is often the case in philosophy, the extreme case is a very bad place to start. Starting…
Everyday Philosophy Popular aphorisms, proverbs and phrases sometimes pithily summarise good ideas. And sometimes, well, they don’t. The enemy of my enemy is my friend You might figure that ‘strong opposition to the government and general programme of Josef Stalin’, might seem to be a pretty good indicator of virtue and wisdom. Not, however, if…
Everyday Philosophy We’re all biased. All of us believe things for bad reasons. We believe things because of wrong assumptions we never question, because of people we want to impress, because of patterns of thought that are evolutionarily useful but not apt for finding the truth. There’s no getting around our bias: the best we…
Everyday Philosophy The Unitarian Church on St Stephen’s Green used to have an eye-catching poster: it said something like: “We ask the big questions: we don’t preach answers.” They’re not the first to claim that as a badge of honour. Being more comfortable with questions than with answers is, for many, a mark of intellectual…
Everyday Philosophy I probably hear more people complaining about free speech in modern society than about any other social or political issue. No-platforming, cancel culture, campus censorship and various other associated phenomena: all are condemned as restrictions on free and open discourse, both by people who share my unpopular opinions and by those who don’t.…
Everyday Philosophy If there’s one thing philosophers hate, it’s scientism. This is, roughly, the claim that ‘science can answer all the meaningful questions that there are to ask’ or ‘the scientific method is all you need to acquire all the knowledge about the world that there is to acquire’. Philosophers hate this for a predictable…
Everyday philosophy There’s a chant that people seeking radical change have used for decades: it was used in the black civil rights movement in the US in the 1960s, and we’ve heard it a lot from the protesters in the past weeks. The chant is: “No justice, no peace.” The statement being made by the…