Life May Be Not Only Meaningless But

It Is Prima Facie Highly Implausible That Life As We Know It Is The Result Of A Sequence Of Physical Accidents Together With The Mechanism Of Natural Selection. We Are Supposed To Abandon This Naïve Response, Not In Favor Of A Fully Worked Out Physical/chemical Explanation But In Favor Of An Alternative That Is Really A Schema For Explanation, Supported By Some Examples. What Is Lacking, To My Knowledge, Is A Credible Argument That The Story Has A Nonnegligible Probability Of Being True.

Any Reductionist Program Has To Be Based On An Analysis Of What Is To Be Reduced. If The Analysis Leaves Something Out, The Problem Will Be Falsely Posed.

What We Take Ourselves To Be Doing When We Think About What Is The Case Or How We Should Act Is Something That Cannot Be Reconciled With A Reductive Naturalism, For Reasons Distinct From Those That Entail The Irreducibility Of Consciousness. It Is Not Merely The Subjectivity Of Thought But Its Capacity To Transcend Subjectivity And To Discover What Is Objectively The Case That Presents A Problem....thought And Reasoning Are Correct Or Incorrect In Virtue Of Something Independent Of The Thinker's Beliefs, And Even Independent Of The Community Of Thinkers To Which He Belongs. (p. 71)

Reason Is Universal Because No Attempted Challenge To Its Results Can Avoid Appealing To Reason In The End-by Claiming, For Example, That What Was Presented As An Argument Is Really A Rationalization. This Can Undermine Our Confidence In The Original Method Or Practice Only By Giving Us Reasons To Believe Something Else, So That Finally We Have To Think About The Arguments To Make Up Our Minds.

A Person May Be Greedy, Envious, Cowardly, Cold, Ungenerous, Unkind, Vain, Or Conceited, But Behave Perfectly By A Monumental Act Of The Will.