A Twenty-First Century Introduction
This textbook explores fundamental issues in the philosophy of science and ethics through medical examples. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of philosophy, medical science, and ethics, advocating for "fallibilism" and "particularism" to promote a pragmatic realism that acknowledges scientific knowledge and situational norms.
The book Free Will and Evolution defends the old notion of free will, according to which such a will is incompatible with determinism and not identical with mere indeterminism. The defense is made from an entirely secular evolutionary perspective. The theory of evolution - properly considered - is argued to be fully compatible with a belief in in a little bit of free will. Moreover, it is claimed that a complete denial normally contains a kind of contradiction. Not a logical contradiction, but a so-called performative contradiction. The denial argued for contradicts the very existence of argumentative discourses.
This volume is devoted to problems within analytic metaphysics. It defends an ontology and theory of categories inspired by Aristotle, but revised in such a way as to be compatible with modern science. The ontology of both natural and social reality is addressed, starting out from the view that universals exist but only in the spatiotemporal world (immanent realism). In attempting to bring Aristotle's ontology up-to-date, the author relies very much on the thinking of Edmund Husserl, conceiving the cement of the universe as Husserlian relations of existential dependence and regarding intentionality as a non-reducible category in the ontology of mind. The work is thoroughly realistic in spirit, but large parts of it should nonetheless be of interest to conceptualists and nominalists, too.