By the time a student in an American school reaches the fourth grade or so, he should be able to identify that the Earth, like all planets in our solar system, orbits the Sun. Yet according to a National Science Foundation poll conducted a few years ago, 24% of Americans believe that the Sun orbits the Earth, rather than the [...]
The modern conversation about the nature of science and its compatibility with other forms of human knowledge – most notably religion, but also “armchair” philosophy, literature, and the humanities more generally – is peculiarly and depressingly repetitive. Examples abound, but this one struck me. Here we have Francis Collins, interviewed by Big Think, in 2010 (via Andrew Sullivan): My study [...]
I’d like to talk about the arguments for and against same-sex marriage – the so-called “merits” of the case. The legal arguments surrounding Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to strike down proposition 8 are complex and interesting. The political gambles made by Boies and Olson on the plaintiff’s side, and by Walker on the judge’s, are exciting. Nonetheless, the legal aspect [...]
Penn Political Review has joined with other college political publications to form the Alliance of Collegiate Editors (ACE), hoping to generate cross-campus dialogue on political issues. The first topic we will discuss is class-based affirmative action. This is the second entry; for the first one, see Sam Barr’s post at HPR. Sam suggests that conservatives who oppose race-based affirmative action [...]
Most people who have heard of Hobbes, it seems to me, know him only as an advocate of monarchy. They probably also know his famous phrase describing life without government: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Also, they’ve probably made the connection between Hobbes the philosopher and Hobbes the stuffed tiger (the connection being that both are cynical about human [...]
I’ve finished the first chapter of my summer reading project. I have read Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, along with several commentary essays on Descartes and on the Meditations particularly (from the Cambridge Companion to Descartes). He wrote widely about all manner of things, from geometry to physics to the existence of God. Fortunately, the Meditations provide a concentrated dose [...]
Hello everybody! You may have noticed a certain…silence…around here in the last couple weeks. That’s because we were all hiding in the library or our rooms, studying for exams and writing papers. Well, not the whole time. But enough of it that we weren’t blogging, anyway. But now all that’s over, and we’ve had a couple days to sleep it [...]
Those of you involved in the wider blogosphere may have noticed a tremendous outpouring of book lists in the last few days. Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, Will Wilkinson, Peter Suderman, E.D. Kain, and Kieran Healy, to name a few, have penned “my most important books” lists. A couple comments, and my list below. First, holy cow [...]
Are you following the Supreme Court cases on same-sex marriage?
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