Richard Dawkins on the Queerness of Nature

This is a very nice talk, given by Richard Dawkins, explaining some of the limits of the human mind: why we can't see sounds, why we can't hear colors. Dawkins espouses an anti-realist conception of epistemology: our knowledge of the world is partly determined by the kind of organisms we are. Ultimate knowledge of the universe is impossible because it has to be filtered by the structure of our brains. This has the consequence that we have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize our experience of other beings: we attribute human character traits to animals, just like we believe god to be a personal entity.



Obviously, the philosophical implications of his view are tremendous, especially as they relate not only to phenomenological knowledge and the metaphysics of personal identity, but to ethical reasoning and the status of the objectivity of ethics. I think Hume would be proud of Dawkins, and rightly so.
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