Ethics & Blastocysts

This article presents something to ponder about ethics and stem cell research, and the promise of a new book to check out in May: The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering.

By Michael J. Sandel, in the Boston Globe.

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Why?

"Notwithstanding some egregious examples to the contrary, though, a sweep of scientific progress since 1600 seems undeniable. We tend to attribute this to the discovery and invention of new things; but at least as important has been the ability to perceive old things in new ways. The Aristotelians looked at a swinging body, Thomas Kuhn says, and saw something 'falling with difficulty;' Galileo looked at it and saw a pendulum. This aspect of science, which is explanatory and explicatory, sometimes bears a distinct resemblance to philosophical analysis. Cosmologists, for example, conceptualize a galaxy as 'particles making up a continuous and perfect fluid;' economists define a ‘product’ as a 'collection of units that are perfect substitutes to purchasers.'"

Toni Vogel Carey discusses the question of whether philosophy, like science, is progressive. Read about it in the latest online issue of Philosophy Now.

Picking One's Brain The Hard Way -- Scientific Developments and Electric Probes

"(There are two 'problems' in the study of consciousness), which the philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem. Calling the first one easy is an in-joke: it is easy in the sense that curing cancer or sending someone to Mars is easy." … "The Easy Problem, then, is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved.
The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, 'That's green' (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, 'When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know.'"

Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, discusses the latest scientific inquiries into consciousness in his article in Time Magazine.

Politics and the Battle Over Definitions

"Is Bush a conservative? Of course not. When all the evidence is in, I think historians will agree with Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, who wrote a carefully argued article judging Bush to have been the worst president in American history. The problem is that he is generally called a conservative, perhaps because he obviously is not a liberal. It may be that Bush, in the magnitude of his failure, defies conventional categories. But the word 'conservative' deserves to be rescued."

Jeffrey Hart examines past presidents and modern philosophers in order to draw a line between President George W. Bush and American Conservatism in the November 20th edition of The American Conservative.

"God Is Dead"

Making Nietzsche accessible to the masses: The Nietzsche Family Circus

Geometry, and Physics, and Metaphysics, Oh My!

"Since the early nineteenth century, Descartes has routinely been called the father of modern philosophy. His attempt at a fresh start for human knowledge, relying on his own reason and casting aside received wisdom, came to typify the Enlightenment project. While his “Discourse” and “Meditations,” with their focus on the nature of certainty, the existence of God, and the relation between mind and body, continue to be read by philosophy students, the bulk of his writings, which were on scientific subjects, has been forgotten. In his own day, his physics, cosmology, geometry, and physiology were given at least as much attention."

Anthony Gottlieb of The New Yorker, looks at two new biographies on Decartes here.