Everyone knows the experience: you happen upon a wreck and know you shouldn’t look but can’t help it. While there is a chance of seeing something disturbing, you look regardless. There should be a word for this and in the absence of one, I will call it car-wreck voyeurism. I felt something like this after [...]
Tags:adaptation·ancestral environment·ASD·Aspergers·autism·autism spectrum disorder·autistic·EP·evolutionary psychology·fantasy·fitness·foraging·gathering·hunting·Jared Reser·Just So Stories·maladaptive·orangutans·Panglossian·Panglossian Paradigm·parsimony·peer review·pleiotropy·Plio-Pleistocene·Psychology Today·Satoshi Kanazawa·sociality·solitary forager hypothesis·spandrels·speculation·Thomas Hobbes
Stephen Hawking’s new book, The Grand Design, is generating a fair amount of press because of his claim that the laws of physics explain the Big Bang and remove the need for a Prime Mover. God in the Gap theists have thus been pushed further back in time to nothingness, which is the non-state that [...]
Tags:bellum omnium contra omnes·Big Bang·Deepak Chopra·deism·design·designer·Enya·God in the Gap·Leviathan·Natural Theology·New Age·physics·Prime Mover·spiritual realm·Stephen Hawking·The Grand Design·theism·theodicy·Thomas Hobbes·transcendent reality·watchmaker analogy·Where is the Design·William Paley·Yoga
While doing some background research on the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), I discovered that he had been much influenced by Lucretius, who lived in the first century BCE (around the time of Julius Caesar) and published a six-volume treatise titled On the Nature of Things. As if writing philosophy in narrative form were [...]
Tags:ancestor worship·atomic theory·Charles Darwin·Christianity·classics·cultural evolution·David Hume·David Sedley·Epicurean·Epicurus·evolution·Greco-Roman·Herbert Spencer·Julius Caesar·Lucretius·materialism·naturalism·Nietzsche·On the Nature of Things·Plato·Platonic philosophy·prehistory·Scottish Enlightenment·skepticism·survival of the fittest·Thomas Hobbes
There is a long history of assessing — and attempting to explain — religion in a functional manner. Marx and Engels figured that the function of religion was to disguise the realities of the underlying economic system and palliate the suffering of the laboring masses. Durkheim thought that the function of religion was to enable [...]
Tags:Civil Religion·Durkheim·Engels·ethics·Freud·function of religion·Marx·morals·Philip Goldberg·proximate cause·Robert Bellah·Thomas Hobbes·transcendence·ultimate cause
