Category: Philosophy of science

  • Where this blog stands

    Various commitments on papers commissioned in French have kept me away from this blog. Reward is another factor: with an average of around 30 daily hits on the English blog and 2500 on the French one, vanity has been a powerful drive for concentrating on the French one. Dialogue is another one. If you’ve had…

  • Would an interruption of the Gulf Stream be reversible? And if so, at what cost?

    I’m blessed with a very popular blog in French. One of the questions that came up lately in my dialogue with commentators is that of the reversibility of major ecological disasters induced by human activity and of the feasibility of reversing such disasters with the tools pertaining to our current technology.

    This is a serious…

  • The cunning of Reason

    The very justification of a Human Complex System’s approach to the operation of human societies, implying a continuous explanatory spectrum from the individual (particle) to the cultural or societal levels (field), is offered by Hegel when he writes in Reason in History (*) that

    … human actions in history produce additional results, beyond their…

  • Logic and semantics in Woody Allen’s “The UFO Menace”

    We read in Woody Allen’s “The UFO Menace” (*) that:

    “Professor Leon Speciman postulates a civilization in outer space that is more advanced than ours by approximately fifteen minutes. This, he feels gives them a great advantage over us, since they needn’t rush to get to appointments.”

    With due respect to the Nobel…

  • Why, like cats, we have nine lives

    Back in 2000 I devoted a paper to some implications of the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics proposed in 1957 by Hugh Everett III in his Princeton thesis entitled “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics”. At the time I had no notion of anybody else in philosophy interested in these issues. The article was…