The ever thoughtful Douglas Murray at Unherd. “Nobody in the West can be wholly non-Christian,” he says, in a central passage. “You may call yourself non-Christian, but the dreams you dream are still Christian dreams, and you continue to be part of the history of Christianity. That’s your fate. You may consider yourself secular,…
Striking paragraph in Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1757). aestheticsAtheismDavid HumeislamLiberalismregressive leftReligionOfPeaceScottish Enlightenment
The vulgar perhaps need a religion: if so, polytheism may well be better, as doing less harm. The sophisticated may well do without one: the trouble is that the religion they may be tempted to embrace may be even worse than the primitive one. Here also, and in some ways parallel, is a distinction that…
The deliciously scathing and independent-minded Susan Haack in Free Inquiry. “The cannibal among the missionaries” — love it! This the quality of mind that I want and admire whatever one’s political persuasion. AtheismCognitive sciencecoherentismEpistemologyidentity politicsnaturalismPhilosophypragmatismregressive leftscience and religionScientismsusan haack
Here’s an article in Motivation and Emotion. agnosticAtheismClay RoutledgeExtraterrestrial intelligencemeaningReligionReligiosity
I’ve always felt that Housman was one of the sharpest and most insightful intellects of his day and certainly beyond, a caste of mind not terribly dissimilar to that other danger man, Bernard Williams. In critical mode reading them is akin to handling razor blades. Below is Housman as scathing classicist. After that is Richard Dawkins reading some…
Susan Haack is one of my absolutely favourite living (and still very active) philosophers. The appellation Passionate Moderate had such deep resonance from the moment I read her eponymously titled book. (This is a great book to read if you are coming to formal philosophy for the first time: Susan writes without ever being “jargony” or condescending…
Article by John Gray from a few weeks back (and surprisingly in The Guardian). It’s a reassuringly simple equation. In fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values. When organised as a movement and backed by the power of the state, atheist ideologies have…
Here’s a review of Alain de Botton’s and Roger Scruton’s latest book, the most recent entries into what has become a thriving publishing niche. The reviewer is rather scathing of de Botton: He is an aggregator of ideas rather than an original thinker, but his skill is to write simply about complex ideas and he gives…
manwithoutqualities 