Ice Age art: as modern as a Picasso

Did language create the modern mind? 

The Venus de Lespugue

 Picasso loved this figure so much he reputedly kept two copies of it. Between 26,000 and 24,000 years old, it will be one of the exhibits from around the world to be displayed in the British Museum's 'Ice Age Art' exhibition (February 7 until May 26).

Policing the border between sense and nonsense

Peter Hacker has long been a strident critic of reductionist neuroscience, and the assimilation of the person/mind to the brain. In this short essay, he considers the purpose of philosophy and how it differs from science.   Where science seeks to distinguish between empirical truth and falsehood (both problematic ideas in themselves), philosophy, he says, seeks to distinguish sense from nonsense.  A flavour of his thinking about contemporary claims about mind and brains can be found after the jump.

Tips about formatting your post

The picture on the left can be positioned left, center, or tight.  When composing your post, click on the image, and these appear as choices (among others) underneath the picture.  For the sake of consistency, I suggest we all choose "medium" as the size of the picture that appears on the front page of the blog.