Nagel on ID and Public Education

Here.

I really think the ID message is getting skewed, partly, by the debate about public education. Still, the attempt to suppress discussion of questions concerning Darwin's theory strikes me as troubling.

Read More

Coyne attacks Nagel

Here is a discussion of Jerry Coyne's reply to Nagel. He considers it outrageous that an atheist would admit any legitimacy whatsover to Intelligent Design.

Read More

Nagel's review of Plantinga's newest book

Here.

Read More

Nagel, Loftus and future science

This is a response to a Loftus post on Thomas Nagel. 

"Scientifically uninformed philosophy, as opposed to scientifically informed philosophy." How in the world do you draw that distinction, given the fact that any step from science to philosophy is a step outside of the content of the science itself. Science always underdetermines the philosophy. Always, always, always.

Yeah, wait and see what science will do with it. That cannot possibly be present science, it has to be future science. If I think that science will reach a future outcome, I am extrapolating based on present science. But let's look at what science has done in the past century or so. We've gone from Newton to Einstein, Einstein to quantum mechanics, and the rejection of subatomic determinism. Scientists of a prior generation would be shocked at these developments. The mainstream in cosmology has mostly embraced a temporal beginning of the universe, something that theists would have expected to find true, but atheists like Russell would not.

Betting against science?

Here's what you quoted from Wikipedia. (OK, I won't quibble about whether you actually read Nagel, as opposed to getting your information from Wikipedia and Amazon. But, at the end of the day, you have to actually read Nagel to see if you have him right).

Nagel is not a physicalist because he does not believe that an internal

understanding of mental concepts shows them to have the kind of hidden

essence that underpins a scientific identity in, say, chemistry. But his

skepticism is about current physics: he envisages in his most recent

work that people may be close to a scientific breakthrough in

identifying an underlying essence that is neither physical (as people

currently think of the physical), nor functional, nor mental, but such

that it necessitates all three of these ways in which the mind "appears"

to us. The difference between the kind of explanation he rejects and

those that he accepts depends on his understanding of transparency: from

his earliest paper to the most recent Nagel has always insisted that a

prior context is required to make identity statements plausible,

intelligible and transparent.

That doesn't sound like he's betting against science, it looks to me as if he has some expectations about what science will eventually say when it gets done. And his point about a prior context seems to me to be logical in nature.

In order to reject this as impossible, you have to accept something like the Dennettian "no skyhooks" rule as somehow definitive of science, so that, if someone breaks that rule, they are, by definition, not doing science. 
I can easily imagine people out of the 19th Century saying that science can never abandon determinism, and that it can never accept a temporal beginning of the universe. To do so would be to not do science.
I see that here, the whipping boy ID has been brought up. I'm not always happy about what ID supporters have done, particularly where public school issues are concerned. But going all the way back to my days studying the philosophy of science, back when there was just creationism and ID had not been mentioned, I remember concurring with my atheist philosophy of science teacher that almost all of the "in-principle" arguments that creationism could never even possibly be science, were bad arguments.

I'm sure some of you will read into those last comments an endorsement of ID, or creationism, and I suppose nothing will stop you from doing so. But, for the record, I didn't endorse either one.

The present-day materialist may think that present science supports what he takes to be materialism. But, he still must look over his shoulder and ask Carole King's question of future science: "But will you love me tomorrow?"

Read More

Thomas Nagel's New Book

With enemies like this, who needs friends?

HT: Steve Hays

Read More