Review of Menary’s The Extended Mind posted to Metapsychology Online Reviews

My review of Richard Menary’s anthology, The Extended Mind, has been posted on Metapsychology Online Reviews (here). I want to thank the editor of Metapsychology, Christian Perring, for his patience while I finished the review.  Between the fall-out at UNLV and the Nevada legislature shenanigans and moving to Oxford, Mississippi, I seemed to have forgotten about many of my professional obligations. This review fell through the cracks, along with other projects.  I am just now picking up the pieces and moving forward.

Overall, I believe Menary’s book is a good anthology of work on extended cognition. But my gripes with the book outweigh the positive things I have to say.  (1) I believe the editor could have included more recent work on the implications for extended cognition in areas like ethics and neuro-psychology.  (2) I believe the book includes arguments that are not necessarily new and innovative; a lot of it rehashes old work.  (3) Finally, critics of extended cognition are not well-represented in this anthology.  It is not that the critics who appear in the anthology (i.e., Adams and Aizawa, and Read) do not provide good criticisms of the extended mind hypothesis; in fact, they do! It’s that the anthology appears to be very unbalanced. Only three of the 15 chapters are critical of the hypothesis.

So, I recommend Menary’s anthology, if only to have a sense of the debate’s landscape (not what is current and interesting about the debate).

The promotion of child rearing is morally objectionable

A recent provision of President Obama’s extensive healthcare policy has called for all businesses, including religious organizations, to cover expenses associated with birth control.  Critics have argued that because some religious principles proscribe its faithful members from using birth control, the provision is an egregious abridgment of their religious freedom.

The focus of the debate has been on one form of “birth control,” namely the prevention of fertilization.  Some religious organizations have been zealous advocates of using only natural means of preventing pregnancy.  For example, under Roman Catholic canon, the only form of birth control morally permissible is natural family planning.  The Church encourages members to use the “rhythm method” to prevent pregnancy.  The rhythm method promotes the scientifically inconclusive idea that refraining from intercourse during ovulation will not result in pregnancy.

Although I agree with the criticism that the provision oversteps the boundary between church and state, my grounds for disagreement do not concern preventive measures of birth control.  I argue that the government should not force religious organizations or insurance companies to provide birth control measures that promote pregnancy.

Robert Fudge in the hizz-ouse…

Some readers may be interested in reading Robert Fudge’s philosophy blog (here). Robert Fudge is a former colleague of mine at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. Robert received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 2001, and he has interests in aesthetics and ethics. He’s on sabbatical leave right now.  While he’s on sabbatical, he’s writing about “dignity” and maintaining a blog on his research progress.

His most recent post is on dignity and transhumanism (here).  Transhumanism, a view that seemed to have attracted much interest among philosophy students at UNLV, is the view that we can fundamentally alter our physiology using available technology to eliminate the aging process or to enhance our cognitive capabilities.  Robert believes that transhumanism poses a challenge to human dignity. In the post, he asks whether our worries over the loss of human dignity should figure into our decision-making process on whether to proceed with adopting technology that will make ‘transhumanism’ possible.

Hick’s Soul-Making Theodicy (5 years on)

The most popular post of this blog has been “Hick’s Soul-Making Theodicy.” It has been viewed more than 7100 times since it was published on 22 April 2007. The funniest thing about the popularity of this post is that I didn’t author it. The post was written by one of my Philosophy of Western Religion students, Joe Shultz, who authored and published the post as a part of fulfilling a requirement for the class. I don’t want to speculate about why the post itself is so wildly popular, but I imagine it has something to do with the topic of the problem of evil.

John Hick (1922-2012) died yesterday evening.  He celebrated his 90th birthday three weeks ago.  Because his work has contributed to the popularity of this blog, in this post, I reproduce Joe Shultz’s wildly popular post: “Hick’s soul-making theodicy” below the fold and provide some comments of my own on the theodicy.

On the expertise defense & the philosopher’s command thesis

There has been a recent effort to defend traditional armchair methods of philosophizing using what has been termed an “expertise defense.”  According to this view, only specially trained persons have philosophically relevant intuitions.  I would like to argue that such a defense succumbs to something approaching a Euthyphro dilemma.  It turns out that what philosophers believe are philosophically relevant intuitions are not those of the experts but of the ordinary person.