By Wayne Myrvold A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science. The title was “On the Social Responsibility of Philosophers of Science.” The idea behind the talk was simple, as it pretty much had to be, given the time constraints. [...]
By Wayne Myrvold I posted a link to my blog post, “Beyond Turf Wars,” on my Facebook page. It resulted in an interest back-and-forth involving myself, philosopher Vishnya Maudlin, and Matt Leifer, a physicist working on the foundations of quantum theories, about, among other things, the differences between physics and philosophy, and the respectove roles [...]
Fascinating article from the NEJM entitled "Two Hundred Years of Surgery" which highlights, inter alia, the importance of anesthesia in the development of modern surgical techniques: Surgeons soon found, however, that anesthesia allowed them to perform more complex, invasive, and precise maneuvers than they had dared to attempt before. Within a decade, for instance, the first successful hysterectomy [...]
By Wayne Myrvold There has been a bit of squabbling, of late, between physicists and philosophers of science. In 2010, in their book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. declared that “philosophy is dead … Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. More recently, the [...]
Nozick’s classic discussion of ‘experience machines’ in Anarchy, State and Utopia attempted to show that, contrary to the ‘hedonistic’ thesis, experiencing pleasure is not all that matters to us. The ‘experience machine’, of course, is a kind of simulated reality wherein the subject would be able to choose pleasurable experiences that would be indistinguishable from [...]