How did February turn into May? It must have been magic! Among the thousand and one things that have been keeping my away from updating my blog over the last couple of months has been a very much overdue review of Rossano’s Supernatural Selection. Reading the book has been interesting but from a meta perspective… [Read more…]
July 30, 2011
The volume edited by Tomas Hribek and Juraj Hvorecky, entitled Knowledge, Value, Evolution, is now out and available in all good internet book-stores (as well as Tesco!) It contains articles by Franz Wuketits, Jonathan Knowles and Jaroslav Peregrin. It also contains an article of mine that I mentioned earlier on this blog. The have-to I… [Read more…]
August 1, 2010
Back in May 2008 took place a conference that I dearly wish I had attended, the topic of it being very much central to my own work, i.e. cognitive approaches to religious and magical ritual. The conference was organised by Armin Geertz and Jesper Sorensen and took place at the Religion, Cognition and Culture research… [Read more…]
May 11, 2010
A colleague of mine at Warsaw University is organising an international conference on language that is going to include a number of people that are well known to me, including a number of past key-speakers from various Kazimierz Workshops. The conference emphasizes the biological nature of language, underscoring its coordinative function. The aim of the… [Read more…]
May 10, 2010
On May 21st I will be giving a talk in Aarhus to the Religion, Cognition and Culture people in Aarhus. Here is the abstract: Explaining the magic/religion distinction using a dual inheritance model The dual inheritance model of religion seeks to explain it as based upon cognitive byproducts that have been co-opted for prosocial functions.… [Read more…]
May 10, 2010
It’s another of those cases where I wish I were more superstitious. I have submitted an application to the European Science Foundation for funding to organise a workshop on dual inheritance models of religion and now have to wait till November to find out if my application was successful. The attraction to cross my fingers… [Read more…]
March 3, 2010
Everyone understands the feeling of excitement that a child feels upon seeing presents under the Christmas tree. Far fewer can understand that such a feeling can be caused by finding out that a particular academic article has been published. Still, I hope that some can understand or even share my joy at finding out that… [Read more…]
February 25, 2010
There is a lot of bad philosophy out there. Every philosophical tradition also has its typical bad philosophy, with bad continental philosophy tending to use obscure language to make trivial points and bad analytic philosophy tending to split conceptual hairs in a way that has nothing to do with reality. Very often philosophers do lack… [Read more…]
February 21, 2010
Due to my interest in the work of David Sloan Wilson, I have found myself on the edge of the group selection controversy. Without necessarily wanting to take a stance on the issue of whether such a phenomenon exists, I have found the issue of interest in itself. As luck would have it, some of… [Read more…]
February 17, 2010
As I’ve mentioned in a couple of posts, I attended a conference toward the end of last year during which Anthony O’Hear presented a paper. Afterwards, I wrote a lengthy paper, “Evolution, cognition, value: the ingredients for a naturalist philosophy”, critiquing his views and putting forward an alternative, naturalist view. The paper will probably be… [Read more…]
May 9, 2012
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