It can be a necessary conceptual truth that pains are painful without this ruling out the physicalist thesis that immaterial minds are impossible or the thesis that conscious states supervene on physical states. The necessity involved in these claims is nomological necessity, not metaphysical necessity (assuming that these are different).

Methodological naturalism gives advice to scientists about what they should include in their theories. There is a second type of methodological naturalism that gives advice to philosophers, which I call "methodological naturalismp." It says that the methods that philosophers should use in assessing philosophical theories are limited to the methods that scientists ought to use in assessing scientific theories.

In many contexts, simplicity is not an aesthetic frill.

Evolutionary biologists often avoid using the term "race" because there is so much racist baggage that comes with the term. However, they are often okay with the idea that the genealogy of human groups within our species can sometimes be inferred in much the same way as the genealogy of different species.

The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

Just as thought experiments can't show that vitalism is true (or that it is false), they also can't show that dualism is true (or that it is false).

If the organisms in a species now have trait T, and this trait now helps those organisms to survive and reproduce because the trait has effect E, a natural hypothesis to consider is that T evolved in the lineage leading to those current organisms because T had effect E. This hypothesis is "natural," but it often isn't true!