On my Facebook wall, Andy Tuck asked me the following, in reply to my post last week about the importance of atheism to skepticism: Can we simply view “atheism” as a subset of “skepticism” and leave it at that? It can be viewed as a peculiar form of skepticism about very particular truth-claims. (I am, [...]

Philosophy Bites has a wonderful 15 minute interview with Frank Jackson, wherein he explains his famous thought experiment about Mary, which was meant to discredit a materialist view of mental states, how he came up with it, and why he now rejects his original conclusions and has become a materialist. Jackson’s original argument from 1982 (in [...]

Paul Rudnick: ‎As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have [...]

Dan Savage amusingly hits on two major philosophical puzzles—the problem of moral luck and the question of whether we can call anyone happy before they die—all while deflating the myth that we should look for a soulmate (i.e., “The One”) rather than the ones who we can “round up” to one: Your Thoughts?

@Humblebrag is a fantastic Twitter account which retweets posts, mainly from celebrities and quasi-celebrities, in which they brag but try to wrap their boasting up all humbly in self-deprecation or in the form of a complaint about how tough they have it or in some other of various possible pretenses towards modesty. (It’s also worth noting that I [...]

Phil Plait laid out all the details last week.  If you, like I, are new to the brilliant term “manufactroversy” (which Phil uses in his post), read and spread this.

Leo Behe’s father is Michael Behe, the author of Darwin’s Black Box, which is responsible for the intelligent design argument that instances of “irreducible complexity” in nature indicate that evolution alone, without a creating intelligence intervening, could not have created life as it is on Earth. (My favorite short, accessible, and engaging summations of what’s [...]

Earlier today I relayed the insights that led atheist and recovering alcoholic Marya Hornbacher (author of Waiting: A Nonbeliever’s Higher Power) to embrace a conception of humility and meaning in life that made AA work for her without her needing to believe in a “higher power”. I summed up the story by referring to this as [...]

Marya Hornbacher (author of Waiting: A Nonbeliever’s Higher Power) was “vaguely atheistic” and “very alcoholic” when she began AA and was taken aback by all the “higher power” talk.  Her response was not to just to submit to dogma and just believe in God and nor was it to reject the program altogether.  Instead she inquired [...]

So eerie: See more photos of the calm before the storm here in New York City here. Your Thoughts?

The world is where we live from WWF on Vimeo. Your Thoughts?

Hi everybody!  We are having technical problems getting our archives to move over and the process of getting all of our features properly set up is likely going to take some time.  So, I am going to take the next week and concentrate on preparing for the new semester of teaching and wait until everything [...]

In coming posts, I want to talk about skeptics who are angry and fearful over the possible conflation of the skeptic and atheist movements. I suppose it will help to clarify from the start that I do not define myself as a skeptic. I am certainly skeptical of all manner of woo and I appreciate [...]

You Are Not So Smart has an interesting blog post on the ways that we assume we know more about others than they know about us: In 2001, Emily Pronin and Lee Ross at Stanford along with Justin Kruger at the University of Illinois and Kenneth Savitsky at Williams College conducted a series of experiments [...]