by Michael Lopresto Many people from all walks of life have been liberated by the phrase “social construction.” Most notably, those with gender identities that don't conform to traditional ideas, and those with behaviours that don't conform to traditional norms and values. In the former case, it's said that gender roles are wholly the product…

by Michael Lopresto When it comes to explaining human cognition and human uniqueness, everyone seems to think that nature and nurture constitute a false dichotomy. Both nature and nurture work together harmoniously to contribute to the cognitive traits that make humans profoundly different to every other animal on the Earth. Unlike every other animal on…

by Michael Lopresto Moral realism is the view that there are moral truths irrespective of what anyone thinks about those truths. In other words, moral truths are mind-independent—a condition that is often taken to characterise any form of realism, be it scientific realism, mathematical realism or even aesthetic realism. So according to the moral realist,…

by Michael Lopresto We, as members of an affluent society, have a moral obligation to help those who are far worse off than we are. To establish this moral obligation, I'll use Peter Singer's Life Saving Analogy from his seminal (1972) paper “Famine, Affluence and Morality” – an argument that strongly influenced my thinking when…

by Michael Lopresto Chris Mortensen is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide. He thinks that the inconsistent hasn't been taken seriously enough in Western philosophy, that the masterpieces of Reutersvärd rub our noses in the inconsistent, and that Western philosophy and Buddhism are complementary. He's the author of Inconsistent Mathematics (1995) and…

by Michael Lopresto Perceptual experience is a distinctly privileged way of knowing about the world. Not only is perceptual experience ultimately the bridge between mind and world, but it also trumps other ways of knowing. When another way of knowing about the world – inference, introspection, memory, and testimony – and experience disagree with one…

by Michael Lopresto What, if anything, makes life worth living? What matters to us most as human beings, and hence enables us to live the good life? Could it be knowledge, or worthwhile achievement, or love? Philosophers have produced various answers to this question. Aristotle argued that the good life is one lived according to…

by Michael Lopresto It's commonplace today to think that the argument for design, with the aim of rationally establishing the existence of God, was refuted by Darwin in 1859, with the publication of The Origin of Species. This view is not only held by evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins, but also top-notch philosophers such,…

by Michael Lopresto The idea of objective value has come into disrepute in some quarters. We have an image of the natural world, well defined by physics—a world of mostly empty space filled sparsely with unimaginably tiny objects (an umbrella term for particles, fields and waves) that are governed in law-like ways. Indeed, this world,…

by Michael Lopresto Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you…

by Michael Lopresto Philosophy is one of the great sciences of reality, as Galen Strawson has said. To this I would add that philosophy is one of the most general of sciences, with the remarkable ability to cross between domains and incorporate both logical and hermeneutical methods. Mathematics and physics have incredible generality, for example,…