Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  The following is from QUORA. Why do some people believe that the concept of God preceded philosophy, even though influential philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard were atheists who believed in God before them? Huh?   This was an AI-generated question, and it illustrates how absurd AI can get. I'm not sure what it means to say that the "concept of God" preceded philosophy. Let us make things easier by speaking of "worship".  The worship of gods certainly preceded philosophy.  Heck, the worship of a single supreme capital-G God may be said to go back to around 1350 BCE, a long time before Thales. So it happens to be the case that our earliest record of worship of God precedes what we generally call philosophy. What sense does it make to ask why people believe such a plain truth?   But then the AI generated question takes a  really weird turn. The evidence that shows that the "concept of God" is not so old is attributed to a trio of philosopher...

 How did hominids first reach Europe? Both the early homo sapiens and their nearderthaler cousins?  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251011105529.htm  The simple answer is "by walking -- that is, by simple ground based migration". We don't have to get fancy here.  If homo sapiens originated in eastern Africa as is now generally presumed, anyplace else in the vast Africa OR Eurasian land masses could have been reached by enough walking over time.   But archeologists want to be more specific.  And as the story on the other side of the above link indicates, there is news here.  We don't have to presume that the original discoverers of Europe passed just north or just south of the Black Sea.  Instead, they could have come across a land bridge that existed right through the middle of the Aegean between 1 million and 400,000 years ago.  A simple matter for specialists, you say?  Yes, but I enjoy the fact of curiosity about th...

One of the common arguments of creationists is that (a) evolutionary theory is based on the radiocarbon dating of fossils, and (b) that dating is utterly unreliable. Both propositions are false. Just for the record, "radiocarbon dating" is only of several methods of radiometric dating, and not one that is important for work on the evolutionary tree.   Radiocarbon, specifically, is very useful for archeologists but utterly useless for paleontologists. It is the use of a radioactive isotope of carbon to tell time, given knowledge of the half-life of that isotope. For anything older than about 50,000 years, there is so little carbon-14 left that it can't be measured accurately. For older finds (those of interest to a paleontologist) one looks for the isotopes of other elements, which have longer half-lives and so different ranges of utility. Somebody once tested a dinosaur fossil using the radiocarbon method, and THAT system declared that fossil to be 50,000 years old. This ...

Archaeologists digging near the Palace of Nestor, at the southern tip of mainland Greece, have apparently excavated some fascinating contents from a 3,500 year old grave. "Recently" in that sentence means the spring of 2015. Three thousand and five hundred years ago means: the time of which Homer tells. The time which was already a distant heroic past to the classical Greeks. So, what's the new finding?  For roughly 70 years now, the scholarly consensus has told of the sudden unexplained death of a Minoan civilization on Crete, and the rise of a successor, Mycenaean, civilization. This in turn has suggested invasion and overthrow. The rich new findings from this grave suggest that there was nothing that dramatic, that there was a period of overlap during which Minoan and Mycenaean worlds existed side  by side, distinct yet trading  and peacefully co-existing. "In other words," writes the Smithsonian's reporter, Jo Marchant, "it isn’t the ...

Suppose I say the phrase "Raiders of the Lost Ark." What is the first image (not the first word or phrase) that pops into your mind? I'm guessing for many of you the first image is of a man in a fedora running frantically away from a giant boulder through a narrow cavern, in imminent danger of some nasty flattening. Thanks to Mad Dog Movies, we have available a recreation of the moment at which that scene came into the head of director Steven Spielberg, under prodding from  producer George Lucas. Lucas, just coming off the success of the Star Wars opening, met Spielberg and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan for some old-fashioned spit-balling. Some of the ideas discussed in that first meeting were immediately discarded, others were left open at the time but never made it into the movie, still others like the boulder became images permanently affixed in our heads. Here's the transcript . At the top of p. 4, Lucas says, "I thought it would be interest...