In this episode we begin a series of recaps and discussions of the issues brought up by individual lecturers at the Society of Catholic Scientists conference on June 9 and 10. We start with Ed Feser's keynote, "The Immateriality of the Mind."
Feser's objective was to highlight how our ability to be rational, and in particular for our thoughts to mean something unambiguous - even in the face of our inability to express ourselves in a completely unambiguous way in our spoken or written words - makes it difficult to maintain a purely materialist / physicalist view of human minds and therefore of the universe they inhabit.
At the outset he noted that rationality tends to occupy less attention in philosophy of mind and matter than two other properties, consciousness and intentionality, which seem widely taken as more difficult to explain by our contemporaries. For ancient and medieval philosophers, however, rationality was probably the clearest indication that the human mind is not some sort of solely physical mechanism.
Feser presents an argument via James Ross (Thought and the World) to try to bring this older consensus into the mainstream. It can be presented thus:
We discuss Feser's points and a few of our own in favor of the two premises: our inability to be sure of the content of arithmetical symbols used outside our own range of experience, the ambiguity of translating ancient languages like Linear A, and the absurdity of believing I can't ultimately know what I'm thinking about.
Episode 111 - A Catholic Teacher – Dear Old Golden Rule Days
Episode 110 - To Solve Big Problems: Let’s Get Small!
Episode 109 - Psychology & Spirituality of Crisis
Episode 108 - Masks, Science, Novelty, and Conservatism
Episode 107 - Dick Garrett on Kids, Schools, and Teachers
Episode 106 - Beyond Heisenberg, the Principal Uncertainty
Episode 105 – Dick Garrett: The Kids Are Smart Enough
Episode 104 - Scraping Facts Online: If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Datum
Episode 103 - Richard Doerflinger on Covid-19, Commercial Confidence, and Imperfect Science
Episode 102 - Diverse Isolation Stories Could Bring Us Together
Episode 101 - Pandemics as a Science Problem; Skepticism in a Diseased World
Episode 100 - Hemispheres Playing God
Episode 099 - Secular Franciscans on World’s New Views, Old Values
Episode 098 - Uncertainty Principles, Principled Uncertainty, and Science in Times of Catastrophe
Episode 097 - Social Distancing and Loners in the American Psyche
Episode 096 - How a Strong Nest Can Lift Society Higher, with Darcia Narvaez
Episode 095 - Bridges Built by Song, with musician Micki Miller
Episode 094 - Maureen Condic (rerun, full interview)
Episode 093 - The Great Divorce between Philosophy and Science
Episode 092 - Scientists and Religion with Dr. Tom Ryba
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