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Monthly Archives: August 2009
McWhorter and Behe Restored
Via Denyse O’Leary, John McWhorter and Michael Behe have been restored to life.
Update from Robert Wright, editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads.tv, Aug. 30: This diavlog has now been re-posted. The decision to remove it from the site was made by BhTV staff while I was away and unavailable for consultation. (Yes, even in a wired world it’s [...]
Posted in topical Tagged bloggingheads.tv, controversy, evolution, intelligent design, Michael Behe Leave a comment
Experimental Philosophy: back to Hume?
It was my intention to spend this Sunday writing a positive summary of this blog’s philosophy but watching Joshua Knobe’s discussion with John Horgan on bloggingheads.tv in February 2008, has lead to change of plan and the return of the Punk Philosopher.
The diavlog opens with a short discussion of Joshus’s biography (where we learn that [...]
Darwin and the Magic of Evolution
Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has posted this, commenting that ‘it reveals much about our place in the natural universe’.
The point being that we can easily see the humanity in the chimps. To be sure it is heartwarming and all of that and I am always happy to see the message that we share [...]
The Summer of Hate
Paul Krugman reports on a very sad state of affairs.
A curious personal observation: I’m getting more crazy hate mail than I have in years, maybe since 2004. But this time the character of the hate mail has changed. [...]
It’s not too hard to understand. Presumably it’s coming from talk radio; I assume the ranters are [...]
Posted in topical Tagged conservatism, culture wars, hate, irrationalism, Michael Behe, Paul Krugman, progessives Leave a comment
The Post-rational Civilization
In many of my posts now I have been stating that we live in an age of unreason, and that this was an innovation of the Enlightenment. Nearly all of the recent posts reflect this theme but these recent posts have been quite explicit:
The Great Evolution Debate
Appleyard on the Great American Health Debate
The Heart of [...]
Posted in 1 philosophy Tagged conservatism, David Hume, Enlightenment, ethics, evolution, irrationalism, Kant, progessives, reason, Romanticism Leave a comment
The Darwinian Austen
Matt Yglesias has tweeted a challenge ‘to write write a hilarious blog post’ about Love in the Time of Darwinism by Kay Hymowitz. Now I am not qualified for this task, but as the challenge arrives while this blog has taken a Darwinian turn, I could’t resist the challenge.
In response to an earlier article Child-Man [...]
Posted in 1 philosophy, topical Tagged darwin, dating, David Stove, ethics, evolution, natural selection, philosophy, postfeminism Leave a comment
The Land of the Brave and the Free
Michael Behe has just put up a post on his Uncommon Descent blog (his first post on the blog) on the bloggingheads.tv fiasco.
Let me emphasize this, dear readers. Here we are living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And yet a web site puts up an interview with an [...]
The Great Evolution Debate
In this post I look the Intelligent Design scandal, Climate Change Denial and what this says about Socrates’s execution, Galileo’s trial and our current predicament.
Having followed John McWhorter on bloggingheads.tv for a while, usually in discussion with Glenn Loury on the presidential election campaign, so I was surprised and delighted to see, via Paul nelson, [...]
Posted in 1 philosophy, topical Tagged Enlightenment, ethics, evolution, Michael Behe, neo-Darwinism, Rupert Sheldrake, Socrates Leave a comment
Sentimental Compassion
Mark Vernon has a post, The hard edge of compassion, where he comments on the retuning of the terminally ill Megrahi to Libya by the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, on compassionate grounds, wondering whether compassion should be shown to a man who killed so many and turning to the great historical champions of compassion.
Jesus [...]
Appleyard on the Great American Health Debate
Bryan Appleyard has been speculating on why American progressives are having such difficulty promoting health reform.
Part of the answer, I think, is the deep American conviction that failure should be punished so that success can be rewarded. This is seen both as a moral and an economic imperative. In this context, failure involves the loss [...]
The Heart of Philosophy
The comment thread on Mark Vernon’s fourth instalment of his Plato series has taken a most interesting turn. (My earlier post True Love discussed this article, arguing that it reflects a modern propensity to take a wilfully irrational approach to love and other related concepts.)
Mark has responded to criticism in the comment thread to argue [...]
Posted in 1 philosophy, topical Tagged David Hume, Enlightenment, ethics, irrationalism, Jane Austen, Kant, moralist, philosophy, rationalism, Romanticism, Rousseau Leave a comment
The Ontological Appleyard
Appleyard has one of his existential proofs of beautiful, witty and intelligent bloging over at Thought Experiments with Kliban and the Ontological Proof.
Appleyard is a very rare breed indeed, a fanatical, lethal agnostic, and seems to be toying with his atheist prey while working out whether to put them out of their misery or not.
There’s [...]
Free Will, etc
Madeleine Bunting has an article in yesterday’s Guardian, In control? Think again. Our ideas of brain and human nature are myths, where she ponders the rising tide of books on consciousness ‘radically challenging the most fundamental assumptions on which human beings operate’.
Perhaps that sounds a little overblown, but it’s not. Who, dear reader, do you [...]
Posted in 1 philosophy, topical Tagged autonomy, Buddhism, causation, free will, materialism, physicalism, Romanticism Leave a comment
True Love
Mark Vernon, has posted the fourth instalment in his series on Plato at the Guardian where he tackles Platonic love.
At the outset Mark wonders whether Iris Murdoch’s interpretation of Platonic love might not be relevant because she was both a professional philosopher and a successful novelist, despite not being acknowledged as a Plato scholar. I [...]
Posted in 1 philosophy, topical Tagged Buddhism, ethics, Jane Austen, love, loving kindness, philosophy, Plato, religion, secularism Leave a comment
Why religion is valuable
In my previous post, The problem with the Enlightenment, I set out my conviction that the Enlightenment had established a false view of the self, that I labelled Romantic, and that this false view had insinuated itself into modern religion as well as its discontents. (See The romantic Austen (IV) for a taster of [...]
Posted in 1 philosophy, commentary Tagged Christianity, David Hume, Enlightenment, ethics, Jane Austen, Kant, original sin, philosophy, Romanticism, Rousseau Leave a comment
The problem with the Enlightenment
My writing here may give the impression that I think religion is necessary for a meaningful and ethical life and it has been pointed pointed out that secular and atheist people are capable of leading meaningful and ethical lives. And indeed they can, though I strongly recommend Thomas Nagel on the meaning of life [...]
Posted in 1 philosophy, commentary, correspondence Tagged Enlightenment, ethics, Jane Austen, philosophy, religion Leave a comment
The Ghost of Madness
I have been doing some reading while taking a break in Cork, checking out J.B. Schneewind’s magnum opus, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. I will blog about this later, but here I want to share something from the preface of Ray Monk’s biography, Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness: 1921-1970 [...]
Posted in commentary Tagged atheism, Bertrand Russell, madness, philosophers, philosophy, secularism Leave a comment
The romantic Austen (IV)
[This is a lightly edited post I put out on on Janites in response to a post by Ellen Moody, asking for a definition of 'romantic' and pronouncing the discussion 'muddled'. My earlier posts in the series, The romantic Austen (especially) and The romantic Austen (III) may provide some useful context.]
I think everyone senses that [...]
Posted in 1 philosophy, Janites Tagged causation, Coleridge, Enlightenment, ethics, Goethe, Jane Austen, Kant, Romanticism, Schelling, Shelley, Wordsworth Leave a comment
The romantic Austen (III)
[I posted this on the Austen-L list in response to Ellen Moody's request 'someone should define what he or she means by romantic'. See also the first and second posts on in the The romantic Austen.]
Sometimes a bit of haziness in definitions is useful and necessary, and I certainly would think it is useful for [...]
Theodicy and the Problem of Modernity
I couldn’t help but reflect on Stephen Bates’s article, How I became an agnostic, answering the Guardian CIF Belief question How did you lose, or find, your faith? It ends on a sad note, Bates wanting to be back in the Roman Catholic fold, but finding himself drifting further away.
[Incidentally, I am not a Christian [...]
Posted in religion, topical Tagged ethics, evil, faith, Jane Austen, philosophy, reason, religion, theodicy, theology 2 Comments
The romantic Austen (II)
I have been reflecting on what have been calling the anti-Romantic romantic Austen, and how clearly Mansfield Park shows us both aspects. As I said in my previous post, the Mansfield Park narrator suggests that Henry and Fanny and Edmund and Mary could have paired up, and here we see the Austen that [...]
Posted in 1 philosophy, Austen-L Tagged ethics, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Romanticism, Sense and Sensibility Leave a comment
Why this Matters (II)
In today’s Guardian George Monbiot publishes a gripping email exchange between himself and Paul Kingsnorth. Paul’s opening salvo is worth quoting at length.
On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in [...]
Posted in commentary Tagged Enlightenment, ethics, irrationalism, philosophy, religion, secularism, William Cowper 1 Comment
Faith & Reason
[I have revised the introduction to the War of Ideas (i), explaining the post a bit better (I hope).]
Reflecting on the Guardian Comment is Free, Cif Belief section today, it struck me just how childishly dualistic public discourse of religion has become.
Posted in topical Tagged belief, faith, irrationalism, philosophy, reason, religion, secularism Leave a comment
A Philosophical Retrospective
I have now completed the articles I planned to write for the philosophy section, bar a conclusion and introductory article. I hope to put a table of contents into the sidebar providing links to all of the articles that make up the thesis before moving onto the next section on literary criticism. Completing [...]
Moral Philosophy