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…
Roger Scruton’s latest (2014) garnering some warm praise, thoughtful discussion rather than the shrill or snide remarks that Roger (one of the most refined minds around) usually attracts. The Independent Wall Street Journal The FT David McPherson architectureArtCognitionconsciousnessExperiencefaithLiteraturemusicReligionRoger Scrutonscience
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…
Michael Ruse in the latest issue of ZYGON The implication is that those of us who think that science and religion can coexist harmoniously are in some sense selling out. The New Atheists have appeared on the scene,and in a classic example of what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences,” while they may hate…
Check out this article by Wayne Curtis and this article by philosopher Louise Richardson. consciousnessexpertiseflavorfoodlouise richardsonNancy FraleyPhilosophy of mindqualiasciencesmelltastewayne curtisWhisky
Bernard Williams in the LRB reprinted in Essays and Reviews: 1959-2002. An update, see: The London Review of Books. As long as there has been such a subject as philosophy, there have been people who hated and despised it. I do not want to exaggerate, in a self-pitying or self-dramatising way, the present extent or intensity of this dislike; I…
A regular young Rupert Brooke was I, —full of expectancy. Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it. That’s what killed my father, English romanticism, that and 1930 science. A line for my notebook: Explore connection between romanticism and…
This in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Is there a novelist today of whom we can we say, as someone said of Dostoevsky, he “felt thought”? To read Dostoevsky, as Michael Dirda pointed out, is to encounter “souls chafed and lacerated by theories.” Yes, Walker Percy Recent arguments about God or creationism are old hat, despite…
Here’s a very good article by Rob Chodat It is the scientist’s “being-in-the-world” that allows her to describe planets and bacteria, “things and subhuman organisms,” but the “being-in-the-world” of the layman occupies what Percy calls a “different sort of reality,” resting upon the linguistic and social ties that constitute a “non-material, non-measurable entity.” And what holds…
Here is astrophysicist Adam Frank’s insightful look at Walker Percy’s wonderful book. I don’t share Frank’s nor Lawler’s nor Percy’s optimism but I’m trying very hard. Also check out Peter Lawler’s take on LITC. There is one book that begins to answer these questions and I’m happy to pass it on. Walker Percy’s “Lost In…
manwithoutqualities 