An Alex Rosenberg interview

This post is mainly to point you to an interesting interview with Alex Rosenberg.

• the mad dog naturalist

which was brought to my attention by Brian Leiter’s blog post.

Rosenberg is a materialist/ naturalist/ physicalist — perhaps we could say that he is a die-hard materialist.  And in this interview, he explains his reductive naturalism.  I am on record as not being a materialist (or physicalist or naturalist).  So you can look to Rosenberg to express some of the views from which I dissent.

I am undecided on whether to have a full post about Rosenberg’s views.  In the meantime, here are a couple of quotes:

How to reconcile physicalism and antireductionism remains a vexed question in biology, in psychology, and of course among metaphysicians as well.

That pretty much summarizes why I am not a materialist or a physicalist.  Namely, I am not a reductionist, and materialism without reductionism does not seem to have any implications worth valuing.

Intentionality—the aboutness of propositional thoughts: a half century of the philosophy of psychology and we still haven’t figured out how it is even possible.

And this is where reductionism fails.

“What They Really Need. . .”

I’m reblogging this, because it is so eloquent. I’ll add a comment shortly.

Itinerant Lurker

I heard something in church the other day that’s been bothering me ever since.  That’s not exactly right actually, it’s something that’s always bothered me – even when I was a Christian – but this brought it to the forefront of my thoughts.

Yes, I’m an atheist who goes to church.  I’m even on a first name basis with my pastor.  I even call him “my pastor”.  It’s weird, but I have a family who are all of them Christians, so compromise is kind of the order of the day.  Typically I don’t mind – but this service was different.

There was a team talking about a missions trip they’d recently returned from (a “missions trip” is when a small group of people raise money from a church to go do some sort of mission work in another country for a few weeks) to South America.  They’d worked with families…

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