William Payne

Obviously we are able to make our own choices about many things. Hume thinks this is all there is to talk of free will. If your action is caused by your choice and not by external factors (being hypnotized […]

People tend to have a very big stake in their own goodness. So it figures that they’d really want moral truths to be simple and clear cut, and the less they’ve thought critically about hard moral issues, the […]

There is a kind of rugged individualism that is quite in vogue in our culture. It’s not surprising that people prize feeling powerful, self sufficient and independent in a culture where everyone has their own job, […]

Peterson’s Straw Man diagnosis of campus social justice activists is concisely put here:

Peterson attributes a fairly sophisticated, if utterly wrong headed, theoretical framework to so called SJWs. H […]

At the social level, bigotry and prejudice are tools of oppression where in groups dominate and exploit out groups. But analysis at this sociological level leaves important questions unanswered about why people […]

The moral relativist believes that ethical truths are relative to groups smaller than humanity as a whole.  That this is true of fundamental ethical truths, not merely derived moral rules, is essential to r […]

 
Intelligent design theory posits the existence of an intelligent creator as the best or only available explanation for the appearance of design we allegedly find in natural phenomenon like the cell. […]

Great session with MacArthor fellow and award winning poet Terrance Hayes at BC’s Carlson Theater today. The event was billed as Terrance Hayes talking about social justice for black lives. This is what happened, […]

Here is a common sense view about truth. There is an external world that is the shared object of our experience and it is some ways but not others. To say the world is a certain way is just to say that it has some […]

We speak of three sorts of things as being true or false

Sentences
Beliefs
Propositions

But what are sentences, beliefs and propositions?And for each of these three we can ask the […]

Many people already recognize moral reasons for driving less, eating less meat, supporting public policies aimed at mitigating climate change and so forth. And most will see acting on those moral reasons as […]

Written in response to some discussion board activity in my online Intro to Philosophy:

Some of you have referred to climate change a few times in our discussions, most recently in connection with trying to g […]

So here’s a now familiar exchange:

B: Black Lives matter!
W: All lives matter!
B: Black lives matter!
W: All lives matter!

We pay close attention to logic in philosophy and from a logical point of vi […]

Philosophers don’t often have much to say about LGBTQ issues. It’s been at least a decade since I addressed homosexuality in writing when a campus group invited a homo-phobic preacher to campus. The reason […]

Here are three very different theses, each of which I have heard on one occasion or another referred to as Cultural Relativism:

What is considered good or bad is relative to culture.
What is good […]

The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently surveyed employers on a range of educational issues including the learning outcomes employers would most like to see emphasized in the course […]

Our state government has publicized data that misleadingly devalues Philosophy and the Humanities in general (see the first link below). My reply follows:

To Members of the Washington ERDC (E […]