Author: Philosophy Talk

The question “what is science?” always becomes more pressing when debates about evolution and creationism are going on. Even though the question is actually a bit of a mess, it suddenly becomes tempting to try to offer a short, concise description of science that can be used to guide decisions about what should and should not go onto high school curricula. Often, the first thing people draw on is Karl Popper’s account of science, based on the idea of falsifiability.

Why did human beings develop traditions of storytelling? Of course, any answer to this question is going to be speculative. But it might be reasonable to assume that the capacity for imagination is adaptive (I need to be able to predict what is going to happen as a result of different courses of action), and that engagement with fictions helps to hone the relevant skills.

The Philosophy Talk team just finished a brief stint “on the road.” On October 27th, we taped a show in front of about 200 Stanford Alums up in Sacramento on behalf of the Stanford Alumni Club of Sacramento. The topic was “Progress and the Environment.” Our guest was Terry Tamminen, formerly head of California’s Environmental Protection Agency and currently Cabinet Secretary (Chief of Staff, roughly) to our beloved Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Posted by Paul Kjellberg The Master said, “At fifteen, I set my mind on learning….

Many thanks to all of you who called during Tuesday’s Philosophy Talk (May 3). We very much appreciated your interest! There are a number of fascinating issues we touched upon, and some we did not. Among the latter is the relationship between interpersonal forgiveness and political forgiveness.

There is such a thing as beauty that is only skin-deep. It is the beauty of appearance, what we call “looking good.” It has little to do with personality, character, wit or morality, and that is because anything that applies to how things look is not a reliable guide to many of their other qualities.