Category: Philosophy

Now, a cute kid story. My daughter asked me why some people used to wear hair shirts and the like. I tried to explain about mortification of the flesh as a way to improve the spirit, how people tried to ignore their physical body to pursue a closer relationship with God. This naturally led to…

In the past I’ve argued that it may be possible to build a basic system of ethics by looking to our evolutionary background to discover what sort of behaviour is natural for humans. This is a natural law approach which looks to our evolutionary heritage to discover the essential nature of humans. Robert George’s work…

I’ve long felt that most people do not change their minds about things that are important to them, including areas like religion and politics. I think most people seem to pick a set of beliefs sometime in early adulthood or before and stick to them. It’s not that people are necessarily close-minded as such. It’s…

The recent clamor over Rand Paul’s comments on the Civil Rights Act were a useful indicator of one of the problems with the libertarian approach to society. Paul was clear, in retrospect, that he supported the Civil Rights Act, but he was also clear that he was concerned about its effect on business owners. Any…

E.O. Wilson’s notion of biophilia, which is slightly different from closely related to the newer idea of evolutionary psychology, posits that humans can not be healthy without some access to the natural world. The argument basically amounts to saying that we have evolved in a world which is not completely under human control, and we…