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 019 - Conclusion: SCS Conference
Episode 018 - SCS Conference: Peter Koellner, Andrew Sicree
Episode 017 - Aaron Schurger at SCSC: Fifty Years Without Free Will
Episode 016 - Valerio Scarani at the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference 2018
Episode 015 - Stephen Barr at the Society of Catholic Scientists Conference 2018
Episode 013 - Human Mind and Physicalism (Society of Catholic Scientists Conference 2018)
Episode 012 - Society of Catholic Scientists
Episode 011 - Intellectual Citizenship (part 2)
Episode 010 - Intellectual Citizenship (part 1)
Episode 009 – Ways to Think of Science and Religion as Parallel
Episode 008 - Paradigm Shifts in Science and Religion
Bonus Episode - Science, Scholarship, and University Teaching
Episode 007 - Falsifiability and Scientific Revolutions
Episode 006 - Evolution in Christianity and Geology
Episode 005 - Evolution in Biology, Physics, and Faith
Episode 004 - Complexity, Cosmic Evolution, Change and Certainty
Episode 003 - Metaphysics and the Divorce between Science and Philosophy
Episode 002 - Is Your Metaphysics Up for This?
Episode 001 - Why You Shouldn't Stay in (but Should Learn from) the Second Millennium
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