I must say, I'm a huge fan of Nomy Arpaly's book Unprincipled Virtue. In the second chapter she argues against the common assumption that our deliberative judgments about what's rational (for us to do or believe) have any special normative authority or significance in determining what would in fact ...

Hugh Pickens writes "Episteme, a daily about the social dimensions of knowledge, has a special issue on the epistemology of mass collaboration, with many of the contrivances focusing on Wikipedia. One of the most interesting apparatus is by Lawrence M. Sanger on the special role of experts in the ag...

I picked up a copy of Charles Taylor’s _The Secular Age_ because I heard it listed as an example of a response to Dawkins et al. I didn’t finish it, because it hardly responds to them at all, save for in one footnote (p. 835n): Dawkins’ reasons for believing that science can sideli...

I’m confused about the seventh definition of the sophist and I want to do the blogging equivalent to thinking out loud.1 Just a warning - this is, to say the least, a very long blog entry that assumes a good familiarity with the Sophist and the method of collection and division. So if you’re int...

One thing I’ve noticed reading the work of creationists and other religious apologists is that they’re quite fond of Richard Lewontin’s review of Carl Sagan’s _The Demon Haunted World_. Sagan’s book, for those who haven’t read it, is a poetic introduction to criti...

I’ve found it hard to be enthusiastic about linking to carnivals, so my carnival linkage has lapsed without my quite intending it to. Therefore, I’ve decided I need to try something new: whenever there’s a carnival, comment on one of the more interesting submissions. Here’s m...

This week, I’ve decided to take a break from reviewing books that specifically deal with Dawkins et al. and look at a book on religious epistemology with no particular target: Paul K. Moser’s _The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology_. The presentation can be clumsy and confus...

(As a regular lurker, and occasional commenter, I've noticed that the topic of Plato and/or Platonic philosophy comes up on occasion -- most recently in the form of a post by writingstudent . Given that, I thought it might be interesting to broaden the subject of discussion by posting a synopsis of ...

If there’s one thing I learned from Francis Collins’ _The Language of God_, it’s that being famous lets you get away with being lazy. The book is heavy on fluff, light on clear views, and downright embarrassing in some points with the lack of research and effort to understand what ...

It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one acknowledges that one is uncertain about morality - not just applied ethics but fundamental moral issues? if you don't know which moral theory is correct? It doesn't seem you can simp...