Richard Carrier Blogs

I Am Now an Amazon Associate in Ten Countries!

Richard Carrier — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 14:48:21 +0000

I now have Amazon Affiliate status outside the U.S.! If you usually buy things on a foreign Amazon site, then when you click an Amazon link on my site (any link in any article or on any of my recommendations pages), it should redirect to your nation’s Amazon page. If you then put anything in […]

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A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research

Richard Carrier — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:13:08 +0000

Here I shall assemble some advice I now realize I always take for granted, but that I find even well-meaning people sometimes don’t know, yet will definitely benefit from. The idiom “Doing Your Own Research” has become a joke largely because the phrase usually comes from people who are shockingly bad at that, but who […]

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A Quick Brief on Identity Theory

Richard Carrier — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 18:59:18 +0000

Just for utility’s sake, I will organize some of my past comments here on identity theory. By that here I mean one’s ontological model of “identity” (not sociocultural identity): that which makes one thing different from another, or unique among all others. I have addressed this before (along with the related question of whether we […]

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My Monthly Recommendation: Ayer and Polanyi

Richard Carrier — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 17:54:50 +0000

With the loss of a family member our income took a hit. My Patreon supporters ensure I will never employ paywalls or intrusive third party ads here, and I always benefit most from more Patreon patrons. And there are other ways to tip me or support my work (like buying my books, and more: see […]

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A Simple Thought Experiment That Destroys Plantinga’s Free WIll Defense of Evil

Richard Carrier — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 17:50:05 +0000

I combine the arguments of James Sterba and my Zardoz simworld framework to show how to use single-point slam-dunks to destroy apologetics, in this case, Plantinga's Free Will Defense.

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Bernardo Kastrup’s Attempt to Bootstrap Idealism

Richard Carrier — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 18:35:41 +0000

Today I critique Bernardo Kastrup's bizarre defense of Idealism as unempirical and illogical. Contrary to his misframing, physicalism is more parsimonious and has more explanatory power.

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Michael Alter’s Exemplary Review of Undesigned Coincidences

Richard Carrier — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 21:13:03 +0000

The Argument from Undesigned Coincidences is a naive Christian apologetic invented in the 19th century but revived recently by apologist Lydia McGrew, which ignores all historical knowledge of the redaction history of the Gospels to argue that, instead of the authors using each other as sources, they wrote completely independently of each other, such that […]

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Fisherian Runaway Doesn’t Work Like That: Manosphere Pseudoscience Strikes Again!

Richard Carrier — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 22:24:50 +0000

I’ve been hired to critically analyze another pseudoscientific bollard from the professional misogynist Stardusk (a.k.a. The Thinking Ape): the incel-mgow argument that “fisherian runaway” proves women (read: “sluts!”) are biologically ruining men, “and it’s all their fault” (regardless of what “it” is; you can plug anything in there you like). This is yet another abuse […]

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Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination

Richard Carrier — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 17:04:47 +0000

Today I am going to offer a naturalist theory of qualia—the particulars of “what it is like” of conscious experience, like the redness of red or the floweriness of a flower’s scent or the twanginess of a guitar, or even what love or fear, or deliciousness or pain, “feel” like. My model can’t be tested […]

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Theism, Naturalism, and Explanatory Power

Richard Carrier — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 16:12:29 +0000

Last week I published an eristic analysis of an exchange of videos between Rationality Rules and Capturing Christianity, on Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism? This time I will analyze a previous Capturing Christianity video, “Why Theism Best Explains Reality (philosophy nerds, get in here!)”, featuring the content creators Tim Howard and Kyle Alander defending […]

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