Leslie Allan

Yuval Noah Harari’s sweeping histories, Sapiens and Homo Deus, have captivated mass audiences while fundamentally mischaracterizing the secular legacy. This essay subjects Harari’s historical taxonomy to critical scrutiny, contesting his arresting thesis that humanism fractured into three warring, tyrannical ‘sects’ responsible for twentieth-century totalitarianism and rapacious capitalism. By identifying profound chronological anachronisms and conceptual conflations within Harari’s framework, this analysis disentangles these systemic misinterpretations. Ultimately, this critique demonstrates that the empirical historical record flatly contradicts Harari’s narrative, thereby vindicating the historical evolution and legacy of humanism.

Duncan McDonald claims his philosophy of Mystrikism supersedes the long distinguished tradition of humanism. He alleges humanism has a human-centric focus, ignoring our moral obligations to other sentient creatures and the environment. This hubris and egotism, he insists, blinds humanists to a sense of wonder and the spiritual dimension in our lives. Leslie Allan shows how McDonald’s criticisms result from an uncharitable reading of core humanist documents and from paying insufficient attention to the history of humanism and the strategic priorities of the humanist movement.

Finding the philosophy of humanism ‘human-centric’, Jamie Woodhouse proposes upgrading it to his redefined ‘Sentientist’ world view. In this essay, Leslie Allan mounts a comprehensive response to Woodhouse’s charge that humanism pays insufficient regard to non-human sentient creatures. He draws from the etymology of ‘humanism’, the legacy of humanist history, humanism’s philosophical commitments and the movement’s real-world strategic priorities to argue that Woodhouse’s wished-for upgrade to ‘Sentientism’ is, in fact, a downgrade.

In this review of Sam Harris’ short book, Free Will, Leslie Allan shares his overall impression of the book in addition to casting a critical eye over Harris’ two key arguments. The first of these is that we ought to abandon our belief that we exercise free will for the reason that all of our thoughts and actions are in principle predicable. Secondly, Harris attempts to rescue us from the seemingly bleak conclusion resulting from this realization. Even though our thoughts are delivered to us by an impersonal and uncaring cosmos, none the less, Harris argues, we are morally responsible for our actions.

The author argues that morality is best understood as a natural human system rather than a supernatural one. By comparing moral rules with traffic regulations, it shows that features often deemed metaphysically puzzling—normativity, fact dependence, categorical force, universality and virtue—arise naturally from the practical need to coordinate behaviour for mutual benefit. Morality, like traffic control, forms an integrated system of aims, rules, roles, virtues and sanctions. Recognizing its natural origins dissolves the need for supernatural grounding and clarifies why moral norms carry authority within human communities.

Some moral theorists ground our moral obligations in their favoured overarching metaphysical scheme. The downside with such an approach is that we are asked to buy into their metaphysics before we can accept genuine obligations. That leaves the rest of us who accept a different metaphysical scheme or no metaphysical theory at all with no good reason to avoid torturing babies. In this essay, Leslie Allan argues for a more down-to-earth approach that leaves aside controversial metaphysical disputes to base morality in that which we all have in common.

Harari's Humanist Wars of Religion is a sharp, meticulously argued critique of the sweeping historical claims made by bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari. Drawing on primary sources and the intellectual history of humanism, Leslie Allan challenges Harari's portrayal of how three rival "sects" of humanism—evolutionary, socialist and liberal—waged what Harari calls the bloodiest wars of religion in history, giving us Auschwitz, the gulags and rapacious capitalism. The result is a provocative and accessible examination of what humanism really is, how it developed and why getting its history right matters for understanding both modern secular thought and the moral foundations of contemporary society.

Donald Hoffman proposed a bold theory—that objects do not exist independently of us perceiving them and that all that really exists is conscious agents. In this critical review, Leslie Allan examines the three core components of Hoffman's new idealism. He proposes solutions to linguistic absurdities suffered by Hoffman's theory before considering its most serious problems. These include oversimplifications of evolutionary theory, self-refutation, heuristic sterility and dependence on scientific realism.

Subjectivists claim that the absence of a theological or metaphysical grounding to moral judgements renders them all as simply statements about our subjective wants and preferences. Leslie Allan argues that the subjectivists' case rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of moral objectivity. He presents the view that subjectivists mistakenly counterpoise the ideal of moral objectivity with the expression of individual preferences. Being objective in moral deliberation, Allan argues, should be regarded instead as the antithesis of parochial and biased reasoning. This account of moral objectivity, he concludes, makes sense of a long-standing universalist tradition in moral philosophy.

In his seminal essay, Harry Frankfurt argued that our exercise of free will and allocation of moral responsibility do not depend on us being able to do other than we did. Leslie Allan defends this moral maxim from Frankfurt's attack. Applying his character-based counterfactual conditional analysis of free acts to Frankfurt's counterexamples, Allan unpacks the confusions that lie at the heart of Frankfurt's argument. The author also explores how his 4C compatibilist theory measures up against Frankfurt’s conclusions.

The author mounts a case against the libertarian and hard determinist's thesis that free will is impossible in a deterministic world. He charges incompatibilists with misconstruing ordinary 'free will' talk by overlaying common language with their own metaphysical presuppositions. Through a review of ordinary discourse and recent developments in jurisprudence and the sciences, he draws together the four key factors required for an act to be free. He then puts his 4C theory to work in giving a credible account of how caused human agents 'could have done otherwise'.

Enlightenment philosopher, René Descartes, set out to establish what could be known with certainty, untainted by a deceiving demon. With his method of doubt, he rejected all previous beliefs, allowing only those that survived rigorous scrutiny. In this essay, Leslie Allan examines whether Descartes's program of skeptical enquiry was successful in laying a firm foundation for our manifold beliefs. He subjects Descartes's conclusions to Descartes's own uncompromising methodology to determine whether Descartes escaped from a self-imposed radical skepticism.

The ontological argument for the existence of God has enjoyed a recent renaissance among philosophers of religion. Alvin Plantinga's modal version is perhaps the most notable example. This essay critically examines Plantinga's rendition, uncovering both its strengths and weaknesses. The author concludes that while the argument is probably formally valid, it is ultimately unsound. Nonetheless, Plantinga's version has generated much interest and discussion. The author spends some time uncovering the reasons for the argument's powerful intuitive appeal. He concludes his essay by appraising Pruss's recent defence of Plantinga's argument.

The materialist version of the mind/brain identity theory has met with considerable challenges from philosophers of mind. The author first dispenses with a popular objection to the theory based on the law of indiscernibility of identicals. By means of discussing the vexatious problem of phenomenal qualities, he explores how the debate may be advanced by seeing each dualist and monist ontology through the lens of an evolutionary epistemology. The author suggests that by regarding each ontology as the core of a scientific research programme, each of these logically irrefutable hypotheses can be tested rationally.

The author contends that classifying theories in the field of meta-ethics along a single dimension misses important nuances in each theory. With the increased sophistication and complexity of meta-ethical analyses in the modern era, the traditional cognitivist–non-cognitivist and realist–anti-realist categories no longer function adequately. The author categorizes the various meta-ethical theories along three dimensions. These dimensions focus on the linguistic analysis offered by each theory, its metaphysical commitments and its degree of normative tolerance.

Meta-ethics is the area of philosophy in which thinkers explore the language and nature of moral discourse and its relations to other non-moral areas of life. In this introduction to the discipline written explicitly for novices, Leslie Allan outlines the key questions and areas of analysis in contemporary meta-ethics. In clear, tabular format, he summarizes the core concepts integral to each of the major meta-ethical positions and the strengths of each view. To prompt further thinking and reading, Allan explains briefly the major objections to each theory and lists each view's best known advocates.

The existence of evil, pain and suffering is considered by many philosophers to be the most vexed question concerning the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and morally perfect deity. Why would a loving God permit wanton acts of cruelty and misery on the scale witnessed throughout human history? In this essay, Leslie Allan evaluates four common theistic responses to this problem, highlighting the benefits and challenges faced by each approach. He concludes with a critical examination of a theistic defence designed to show that the problem of evil is not a problem at all.

The author challenges both the eliminative idealist's contention that physical objects do not exist and the phenomenalist idealist's view that statements about physical objects are translatable into statements about private mental experiences. Firstly, he details how phenomenalist translations are parasitic on the realist assumption that physical objects exist independently of experience. Secondly, the author confronts eliminative idealism head on by exposing its heuristic sterility in contrast with realism's predictive success.

Imre Lakatos holds a well-deserved primary place in current philosophy of science. In this essay, Leslie Allan critically examines Lakatos' theory of knowledge in two key areas. The first area of consideration is Lakatos' notion that knowledge is gained through a process of competition between rival scientific research programmes. Allan identifies and discusses four problems with Lakatos' characterization of a research programme. Next, Allan considers Lakatos' proposed test of adequacy for theories of rationality using his methodology of historiographical research programmes. Allan discovers tensions within Lakatos' criteria and suggests ways of strengthening his test.

The soul-making theodicy seeks to explain how belief in the existence of God is compatible with the evil, pain and suffering we experience in our world. It purports to meet the problem of evil posed by non-theists by articulating a divine plan in which the occurrence of evil is necessary for enabling the greater good of character building of free moral agents. Many philosophers of religion have levelled strong objections against this theodicy. In this essay, Leslie Allan considers the effectiveness of the counterarguments advanced by theist philosopher, Clement Dore, to two key objections to the soul-making theodicy.

Some atheistic philosophers have argued that God could have created a world with free moral agents and yet absent of moral evil. Using possible world semantics, Alvin Plantinga sought to defuse this logical form of the problem of evil. In this critical note, Leslie Allan examines the adequacy of Plantinga's argument that the existence of God is logically compatible with the existence of moral evil. The veracity of Plantinga's argument turns on whether his essential use of counterfactual conditionals preserves the logic of this type of conditional.