AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE

THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES
Gauguin’s enormous question
Gardner’s disciplines
The consilience of knowledge
Anderson’s emergent properties
Dennett’s emergence of meaning

MATHEMATICS
Certainty and consistency in mathematics
Platonists and Formalists
Mathematical intuition
Feynman on pattern in mathematics
A beauty cold and austere
Consensus of the qualified


THE NATURAL SCIENCES

Is there a scientific method?
E. O. Wilson on what scientists really do
Link to Popper on falsifiability    
“Doing your damnedest, no hold barred!”
Kuhn and Feyerebend on Paradigm Shift (in “Embodied Knowers”)
Lakatos and his Research Program
41 orders of magnitude

THE HUMAN SCIENCES
Deconstructing statistical evidence
Pluralism in the social sciences  
Exorcising hard core relativism and the Sokal hoax

HISTORY
Link to Marwick and the nature of history
Primary and secondary sources

ETHICS
Moral Sense Test lab
The pros and cons of utilitarianism
Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance
Kant's Categorical Imperative
The universality of the Golden Rule
The Seven Deadly Sins
Foot binding and the peacock’s tail
Female genital mutilation
Nuremberg
Link to Smullyan’s Is God a Taoist?
Vera Drake: saint or serial killer?
Bronowski at Auschwitz

THE ARTS
Bronowski's method of the artist
The Rembrandt self-portraits
Picasso’s lie
Mathematics, physics and music
4’ 33’’
“That willing suspension of disbelief”
Attempting to Draw a Naked Human Being

PHILOSOPHY
The value of philosophy
Sapere aude!
Chi non sa far stupir, vada alla striglia