One of the more striking incoherences characteristic of the Enlightenment is the struggle to establish a naturalistic foundation for morality and ethics. Given the success of the natural sciences and overall confidence in the human cognitive capacities to understand and explain nature in a purely mechanistic way, the hopes of Enlightenment thinkers must have been …
About a year ago, I wrote an article about differentiating between explaining behaviour and describing it. Today, I add another layer to this reflection. What do we want to know when we ask for an explanation of a certain behaviour? For instance, if I wanted to know why John went to the kitchen, would I be satisfied …
Last week I posted an article on the main approaches to thinking about the laws of nature. In short, we can demand that laws explain nature or we can be satisfied with them merely describing nature. But can we always tell the difference? Do we always know when we are just describing and when we …
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