I think there is a problem with anti-semitism in Labour, and the leadership was too slow to deal with it. However, I’m not convinced that they’re wrong on what has become the central issue: the IHRA definition of anti-semitism. Some people think that a state should not be defined on ethnic lines, and these people have a problem with Israel being defined as a state primarily for people of Jewish ethnicity. Here’s Joe Levine arguing […]
The following is a guest post by Sophie Grace Chappell, who is a Professor of Philosophy at the Open University Maybe we should think of it like this: Transwomen are to women as adoptive parents are to parents. There are disanalogies of course, and the morality of adoption is a large issue in itself which I can’t do full justice to here. Still, the analogies are, I think, important and instructive. An adoptive parent is […]
Here is footage of a debate I did at the ‘How the Light Gets In’ Festival at Hay on Wye last month. It got pretty intense (in a nice way…) and was lots of fun. I was defending panpsychism against the illusionism of Nicholas Humphrey and the illusionist/panpsychist position of Susan Blackmore.
There was a rather crude attack on panpsychism published last week in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. It contained the usual cliched “arguments” – accusing panpsychists of being anti-science and really just seeking the comforts of religion – without really addressing the roots of the problem of consciousness and the merits of the panpsychist solution. On Friday there was an excellent reply by Godehard Brüntrup, Professor of Philosophy at the Munich School of Philosophy. […]
I’ve spent the last few months exploring an unorthodox explanation of cosmological fine-tuning, which I discuss in this article and this talk. Part of my motivation was dissatisfaction with the two more conventional alternatives: God and the multiverse hypothesis. And part of the my dissatisfaction with the multiverse hypothesis was rooted in Roger White’s intriguing article arguing that the multiverse hypothesis doesn’t even explain the fine-tuning. As I said in a couple of recent talks […]
I’m pleased to announce that I now have publishing contracts in US and UK for my new book ‘Galileo’s Error: A Manifesto for a New Science of Consciousness’. The book will be highly accessible and will explore the problem of consciousness and why a growing number of philosophers and neuroscientists are coming to see panpsychism as the best hope for a solution. It will be published in Autumn 2019 by Pantheon in US and Rider […]
Here’s a talk I gave at the Ian Ramsey Centre at Oxford Uni recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-Uq_5Lj76Q&t=343s I’ve somewhat neglected this blog recently…but having come to the end of very busy period should be able to do more updates in the near future…
