Rationally Speaking

In Pursuit of Positive Skepticism

Massimo Pigliucci is a Professor of Philosophy at CUNY and author of Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism, and the Nature of Science. See full bio

September 16, 2009

Fish against curiosity

Readers of this blog may begin to think that I have a personal antipathy for New York Times editorialist Stanley Fish. I don’t, really. Don’t even know the guy. And yet, somehow he manages to get criticized in writing by yours truly more often (and certainly more harshly) than Richard I-don’t-know-what’s-wrong-with-Bill-Maher-but-I’ll-endorse-his-award Dawkins. Read More

September 10, 2009

Ah, metaphysics!

The other day I went to a talk about the fall and revival of metaphysics, given by Sebastian Kolodziejczyk at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Metaphysics these days has a bad reputation even among philosophers, so I was aware of its “fall,” but I was rather curious about the possibility of a “revival.” I came out of the lecture without much conviction that the 21st century is going to see anything like a resurrection of metaphysics. Read More

September 4, 2009

The logic of skepticism

Being a skeptic is a rather lonely art. People often confuse you for a cynic, and I’m not using either term in the classical philosophical sense, of course. In ancient Greece, the cynics were people who wished to live in harmony with nature, rejecting material goods (the root of the word means “dog-like,” and there are various interpretations as to its origin). The Western equivalent of Buddhist monks, if you will. The skeptics, on the other hand, were philosophers who claimed that since nothing can be known for certain the only rational thing to do is to suspend judgment on everything. That’s not what I’m talking about. Read More

August 26, 2009

Definitions, definitions

Scientists are often assumed to be obsessed by definitions. After all, if you cannot precisely define a concept, say what a planet is, or what a biological species is, you literally don’t know what you are talking about, and how can you then possibly do science using that very same concept? And yet, the practice of science is very different, and to a surprising extent does not seem to depend on definitions of its objects of study. Read More

August 18, 2009

An evening with paranormalists

A local skeptic group here in Brooklyn organized a roundtable discussion on the paranormal. Real believers in the ghosts and the afterlife showed up, a somewhat rare opportunity to sit down with “the other side” and have a probing conversation to find out why people to believe weird things. Read More

August 11, 2009

Good point, Dr. Sagan!

I finally got around to reading Carl Sagan’s The Variety of Scientific Experience, a volume edited by his wife, Ann Druyan, and based on a series of Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology that Carl delivered in 1985 at the University of Glasgow. The title of the book is a direct reference, and gentle challenge, to William James’s somewhat frustrating The Variety of Religious Experience (also based on a series of lectures, those presented at the University of Edinburgh in 1901). Read More

July 29, 2009

The New Yorker vs. the Kindle

If you live in New York and like to feel a part of the local intelligentsia, you simply have to read the New Yorker. Which I do, regularly, every week. I can't get through the whole thing, so I usually concentrate on the short essays of "The Talk of the Town" (gotta read that!), browse "The Critics" (about the latest in theater, books, movies and sometimes music), and always skip poetry and fiction (sorry, I've got better sources for the latter and I don't care too much for the former). The "Reporting & Essays" section is the real tough nut to crack: the articles there are very long and in-depth, and usually only one of the 4-5 published in each issue really grabs me. This week it was an essay penned by Nicholson Baker, about the Kindle, the Amazon e-book device that readers of this blog know very well I absolutely love. Ok, I was bracing myself for an irritating experience, as surely an essayist for the New Yorker would be too sophisticated not to complain about the Kindle. Read More

July 27, 2009

New blog: Gullibility is Bad for You (.org)

Those of you who know or follow me surely realize that I'm not exactly a guy with a lot of spare time on his hands. Yet, I just launched a second blog devoted to short entries (mostly a paragraph with an accompanying link) to document the fact that gullibility is bad for your health Read More

July 26, 2009

Memes, selfish genes and Darwinian paranoia

I’m reviewing a book by philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith entitled “Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection.” (This is not the book review, forthcoming.) Godfrey-Smith makes an excellent argument at some point in the book (chapter 7, on the gene’s eye view) that genes are not at all the sort of things Richard Dawkins and some other biologists think they are. Read More

July 21, 2009

Republicans on health care: vicious, or just plain stupid?

Yes, yes, the title of this column is obviously partisan. But you have to wonder at what exactly the Republicans are doing in the midst of the health care reform debate. RNC Chairman and token black Michael Steelerecently characterized, again, the Obama administration effort as socialism. Read More

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