"One of the best contemporary writers on philosophy" National Review
"A terrific writer" Damian Thompson, Daily Telegraph
"Feser... has the rare and enviable gift of making philosophical argument compulsively readable" Sir Anthony Kenny, Times Literary Supplement
Selected for the First Things list of the 50 Best Blogs of 2010 (November 19, 2010)
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Trump: A buyer’s guide
In the weeks
since I
wrote on the dilemma that Donald Trump has put social conservatives
in, the problem has only become far more pronounced. Trump has
stated that a second Trump administration “will be great for women
and their reproductive rights.” His
running mate J. D. Vance has said
that if a national abortion ban were passed by Congress, Trump would veto
it. Though claiming to support pro-life
measures at the state level, Trump says that
in Florida, abortion should be legal even past the first six weeks of pregnancy. And he has said
that in a second Trump administration, the government would either pay for, or
require insurance companies to pay for, all costs associated with IVF treatment
– even though IVF treatments kill
more embryos every year than abortion does, so that an IVF mandate
would be even worse than Obama’s notorious contraception mandate. Trump has
also come out in support of legalizing marijuana for recreational
use.
Sunday, September 1, 2024
The problem with the “hard problem”
Robert
Lawrence Kuhn is well-known as the creator and host of the public television
series Closer to Truth, an invaluable
source of interviews with major contributors to a variety of contemporary
debates in philosophy, theology, and science.
(Longtime readers will recall an exchange Kuhn and I had at First Things some years back on the
question of why there is something rather than nothing, which you can find here,
here,
and here.) Recently, Kuhn’s article “A
landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications” appeared in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. It is an impressively exhaustive survey of
the field, and will be extremely helpful to anyone looking for guidance through
its enormous and often bewildering literature.
Kuhn kindly includes a section on my own contributions to the subject.