Tag: Philosophy
Do we feel free when we make hard decisions? A psychological perspective on feelings of freedom in decision-making
Dr Stephan Lau, a Junior Professor at the Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences in Berlin, is one of the first researchers to investigate experiences of freedom from a psychological perspective. Over the past decade, Dr Lau and his colleagues have conducted much research using a wide array of novel techniques to explore different factors which influence our experiences of […]
Beyond Alchemy: Robert Boyle’s Mechanical Philosophy
Dr Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino is a researcher at Florida Atlantic University. In her book, The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle: Mechanism, Chymical Atoms, and Emergence, she offers a detailed account of the mechanistic theory of matter advanced by Robert Boyle. She explains the ways in which Boyle departed from his predecessors to create a more complex and complete chemical philosophy […]
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Genuinely theoretical: The case for Philosophical Biology
Though his background is in biomedicine, Dr Sepehr Ehsani is currently completing his PhD in philosophy at University College London. In his time working in the lab, Dr Ehsani became more aware of the often-neglected importance of theory. What is sometimes called theoretical biology is not usually ‘theory’ for the most part, in the sense that it is not truly […]
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On the solvability of the mind–body problem
The mind-body problem is one of the most enigmatic issues in philosophy that has yet to be resolved. Professor Jan Scheffel from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden analyses the mind–body problem from a physicalist perspective. He finds that consciousness is epistemologically emergent and shows that this result overlaps with the problem of free will. If a theory for consciousness […]
Fractured Knowledge: “Fake News”
Prof Jagdish Hattiangadi, York University, Canada explores how a common or shared knowledge base, including specialised secular science, helped bring peace to warring religious factions in modern liberal democracies. This interreligious peace is threatened by a philosophical backlash, with claims and counter claims of fake news, thus fracturing the common knowledge base needed for dispute resolution. Populist political movements have relied […]