Utopia and nihilism: Leszek Kolakowski’s philosophical lessons

Philosophical lessons of entanglement

The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern scientific thought. There are two kinds of statements about the world: those made from inside the world, and those from outside. The conflict between contradictory s...

Turing's three philosophical lessons and the philosophy of information.

In this article, I outline the three main philosophical lessons that we may learn from Turing's work, and how they lead to a new philosophy of information. After a brief introduction, I discuss his work on the method of levels of abstraction (LoA), and his insistence that questions could be meaningfully asked only by specifying the correct LoA. I then look at his second lesson, about the sort o...

Nihilism, Relativism, and Literary Theory

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Nihilism and stroke therapy.

In spite of recent advances in supportive management and prevention of stroke, it is not uncommon to hear nonneurologists as well as neurologists express the opinion that "nothing can be done for a patient with a stroke." These individuals are expressing an attitude of therapeutic nihilism. The word nihilism is derived from the Latin nihil, meaning "nothing." A therapeutic nihilist is one who s...

Logical Nihilism