William Payne

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 […]

It’s time to announce the first general release of my open source Introduction to Philosophy. If you are looking for some light reading for your spring break you can find this electronic text as a Word file or a […]

It’s been a little while since we put out a Critical Thinking note and this has partly been due to uncertainty about how to proceed given the loss of ALL BC-FYI. The note below was submitted to ALL BC […]

Logic used to be a fairly popular course on this campus. We would routinely offer four or five sections every quarter. But since the recent changes to the reasoning requirement in the DTA, very few […]

Logic has taken a real hit at BC since the recent changes to the Direct Transfer Agreement. But we just might manage to run two sections of it this fall. We will need some more students though. There are […]

This time we bring you a dialogue on moral realism authored by our newest philosopher Greg Damico (you might recall Greg as the BC philosopher who recently won the national Rockerfeller prize).

MANNY:  P […]

We often ask students to explain one thing or another. Judging from the single sentence or sentence fragment responses we often get, it seems to me that our students all too often don’t really understand wh […]

Critical Thinking Note 8: What Would Follow From ThatHere’s a useful reasoning pattern: test a claim by seeing what follows from it deductively and considering whether there are g […]