In 1995, the physicist and popular science writer Paul Davies was presented with a John Templeton Foundation award. This foundation awards individuals who’ve made a “significant contribution to the advancement of religion”. The priest and physicist Mariano Artigas wrote a piece on Davies’s award. After asking “why was [the unconventionally…

In the mid-1990s, the science journalist John Horgan interviewed various physicists (including Sheldon Glashow, Edward Witten and Steven Weinberg) who spoke both for and against the strongly speculative (or “nonempirical”) nature of much contemporary physics and cosmology. After Horgan wrote The End of Science, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, the writer…

Yes. That’s right. There is indeed a self-referential problem with the title above. It contains the words “cult leader”, which can be deemed to be abuse. However, I haven’t done this kind of thing with any other philosopher before. I do it with Bernardo Kastrup because he stridently preaches his…

Way back in 1992, the science journalist John Horgan (who writes for Scientific American) interviewed the anarchist philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend. (A full account of this interview can be found in Horgan’s 1996 book, The End of Science.) In that interview, Feyerabend asked Horgan, “What’s so great about knowledge?”…

Philosopher Dr. Kane Baker argues that there are hard problems of liquidity, white walls, balls, and, indeed, “everything”. He cites three examples: (1) There’s a logical possibility that “you have the same H₂O microstructure, but you just don’t have liquidity”. (2) You can look at a white wall, and yet…

The American philosopher David Kellogg Lewis (1942–2001) approached the lottery paradox from a philosophical angle. That is, he didn’t approach it in the same way as many mathematicians, scientists and logicians had previously done. Lewis, instead, focussed on knowledge and justification and their relation to the paradox… Yet knowledge and…

The philosopher Michel Foucault argued that (most? all?) people don’t realise that the epistemes they exist within determine their experiences, “discourse”, beliefs and even behaviour. (According to Foucault, epistemes constitute “the historical a priori”.)… So how did Foucault and similar theorists (e.g., Marx, etc.) escape from the conceptual schemes and/or…

The main character in The Matrix (Neo) experienced a reality which was entirely an illusion. Yet, on David Chalmers’ take, his reality+ idea is mainly about what does — and what will — happen when individuals, groups and entire societies consciously (or willingly) create virtual realities. Thus, in that strong…

Paul Davies is a physicist and writer of popular books on science. To use Davies’s own words about the theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler, he is “not afraid to tackle deep philosophical questions”. …