A Narration from Scriptural References Lord Krishna described the glory of Varuthini Ekadashi in terms of charity, “Better than giving horses in charity is giving elephants, and better than giving elephants is giving land.Better still is the giving sesame seeds…
Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J., & Chun, M. M. (1997). The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception. Journal of neuroscience, 17(11), 4302-4311. – Jordan Zlatev (University of Lund) Glazer, T. (2019). The Social Amplification…
If free will is an illusion, then it’s an illusion whether you believe in it or not. So the Rev Carl Harding’s hard determinists had no choice but to look both ways before crossing the road. And a hard free…
A new biography, Places of Mind, by his student and friend Timothy Brennan, draws out many of the contradictions and puts them in personal and historical context. Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist Arendt, Baldwin and Said were very different…
To back up this general claim, Smithies argues for phenomenal mentalism, which he formulates as follows: References Necessarily, which propositions you have epistemic justification to believe at any given time is determined solely by your phenomenally individuated mental states at…
(Paul): The conceit of our course is this: Philosophy can help you think about your life and maybe even make it better. Into Philosophy was influenced by one of the books that inspires me the most, We Are All Explorers:…
Declan discusses Schaffer’s case of the debasing demon. I wonder if evidence, no matter how strong, that one is currently a victim of the debasing demon could rationally permit forming a belief that one is currently a victim of the…
The theory that our choices are determined by forces that go back to prehistory is pointless and dangerous. Pointless because any decision taken can be explained by the theory of predetermination or by the common view that people are able…
Rationality requires knowing what you believe, since otherwise you’re liable to fall into an irrational Moorean predicament (174). Declan’s book offers a remarkably systematic picture of the nature of and relations among phenomenal consciousness, justification, belief, and self-awareness. In this…
Vulnerable only [5] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/fair-allocation-mechanism-for-covid-19-vaccines-through-the-covax-facility [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/02/vaccine-nationalism-harms-everyone-and-protects-no-one/ Here, we explore a question of practical ethics: what is the appropriate extent to which a country can prioritize its own people over those in other countries in the securing of vaccines for COVID-19?…
Here is the link to the full version of their commentary. Relevantly, the phenomenal sufficiency thesis seems to imply that if a creature has a perceptual experience, even if it lacks the capacities to form beliefs, the perceptual experience can…
There are two situations when a general anaesthetic might be used in dying patients. The first is when other drugs have not worked and the patient is still distressed or in pain. The second is when a patient has only…
Suppose that your belief “It is raining in Shanghai” is due to wishful thinking, and your total evidence is entirely neutral with respect to this matter. Given your evidence, it could either be true or false that it is raining…
To the free will sceptics, this is all just a desperate attempt at face-saving and changing the subject – an effort to redefine free will not as the thing we all feel, when faced with a choice, but as something…
