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Author Archives: Huenemann
3QD: Protective Living Communities
By 2025, protective living communities (PLCs) had started to form. The earliest PLCs, such as New Promise and New New Babylon, based themselves on rationalist doctrines: decisions informed by best available science, and either utilitarian ethics or Rawlsian principles of … Continue reading
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Thomas Huxley: Making the ‘Man of Science’
Reading: Paul White, Thomas Huxley: Making the ‘Man of Science’ (CUP 2002). In a sense, this book is about the term “scientist”. Thomas Huxley regarded it as a crass Americanism, a term that belittled anyone who devoted their life toward … Continue reading
Posted in Books
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3QD: What’s in your beetle box?
…But the problem with sense data is that they don’t exist. Here are a couple of reasons for being suspicious of them. First, there isn’t any empirical evidence of them whatsoever, apart from our thinking that they exist. (This is … Continue reading
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3QD: Living in Bubbles
A crisis, by definition, has dramatic effects. It changes how we behave, where wealth goes, what policies we enact, and what we hope. But it also can bring into higher relief features of our lives that have not changed, but … Continue reading
Posted in 3QD essays
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The Ring of Gyges (a story)
So, I’m no fiction writer (at least, not on purpose). I give it a shot now and then, for fun. A while back I had a plan to write a series of stories featuring the “wonder cabinet” of Dr Tenebris, … Continue reading
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Richard Marshall interview at 3:16
Richard Marshall is a creative and interesting guy who has passions for making vivid paintings and interviewing philosophers. Somehow he decided to interview me, with the result to be found here. I had loads of fun answering his questions.
Posted in This & that in the life of CH
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3QD: Freedom and determinism – what we can learn from the failures of two pretty good arguments
The “Consequence Argument” is a powerful argument for the conclusion that, if determinism is true, then we have no control over what we do or will do. The argument is straightforward and simple (as given in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): … Continue reading
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Structure, Energy, and Reality
This past term I’ve been teaching a capstone class in which students are supposed to write a longer paper on some topic that means a lot to them. It’s meant to be a culminating event for their undergraduate work in … Continue reading
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3QD: Our very own annus mirabilis
This isn’t the first time universities have shut down from fear of pestilence. In 1665, “it pleased the Almighty God in his just severity to visit this towne of Cambridge with the plague of pestilence”, and Cambridge University was closed. … Continue reading
Posted in 3QD essays, Historical episodes
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3QD: Thoughts on Killing a Dog
Last week we had our dog put down. It was time. She was getting old and facing some serious neurological difficulties. The tipping point was a pair of severe seizures in the middle of the night, spaced about a minute … Continue reading
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3QD: Reflections on It-ing and Thou-ing
We find ourselves always in the middle of an experience. But it’s what we do next – how we characterize the experience – that lays down a host of important and almost subterranean conditions. Am I sitting in a chair, … Continue reading
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Back to 3QuarksDaily
After a bit of a break, I’m going to resume contributing monthly essays at 3QuarksDaily. The first essay is now up, alongside the fascinating essays, poems, and insights from the other contributors. How To Be Kind “There’s only one rule … Continue reading
The impact of Boris Hessen
Reading: Gerardo Ienna and Giulia Rispoli, “Boris Hessen at the Crossroads of Science and Ideology from International Circulation to the Soviet Context”, Society and Politics, 2019, 13:37-63. [These are just some preliminary notes on a very complex story I am … Continue reading
Is there such a thing as the history of philosophy?
(Reading Christia Mercer. “The Contextualist Revolution in Early Modern Philosophy.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 57, no. 3 (2019): 529-548.) Christia Mercer has revisited the methodological battles that have waged among scholars of the history of philosophy. She uses … Continue reading
Posted in Items of the academy / learning
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