After this introductory paragraph, every sentence in this post will summarize and link a different post expressing my views, primarily on topics related to atheism, philosophy, and ethics—which are the primary preoccupations of this blog. I am organizing all of these links into this one summary statement of “Camels With Hammers’ Philosophy.” This post will [...]
Greta Christina takes down the argument that the desire for God proves there is a God to fulfill it out there to be discovered: Someone (I can’t remember who now) recently pointed out that the “no atheists in foxholes” argument, even if it were true (which it’s not), isn’t an argument for God’s existence. It’s actually [...]
Stirring: Your Thoughts?
One last Kanye thought for the morning, before I return to my work for the day. From Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra part II, section 3, comes his prescription in a nutshell for how to be a Beyonce or a Barack rather than a Kanye or a Wilson: if we learn better to experience joy, we [...]
So last night, Kanye proved once and for all that he has no class through a single action which demonstrated an unbelievable lack of grace. Taylor Swift looked so demoralized and her speech had been all about feelings of being surprised to be accepted by this particular voting bloc, when he insulted her by implying [...]
That illustration comes from Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth about Bertrand Russell’s real life philosophical adventures. The Independent’s writes: The subject of the newest comic-strip sensation, though, might still raise eyebrows: it’s the story of the quest for the foundation of mathematics, starring and narrated by Bertrand Russell, the British logician, philosopher, mathematician, reformer, pacifist, [...]
In honor of the exciting news that the “Kids in the Hall” from Kids In The Hall, one of the gold standard comedies of my youth (and one of the earliest great HBO original shows, along with the wonderful Dream On) will be reuniting for a new 8-part comedy TV series, here is a clip [...]
Carlos Ruiz is working on an internet source that organizes references to Nietzsche on various topics to make his work more searchable. I take it is something of an e-concordance he wants to design. He’s calling it a “Nietzsche Grid” and is taking input on the project here. And, far more importantly, there is the [...]
In reply to this post from late last night in which I took a first pass at trying to sketch out my views on fate, George writes: Dan, Again I find myself thanking you for this blog. Good blogging is all for naught without good readers (and especially without good readers who contribute excellently and [...]
In reply to some remarks I made about the recognition of genuine meaning without reference to religion, George replied with this challenge: Dan, Now you have got me thinking…. I’m not entirely clear about your point of meaning in everyday events. My logic tells me that a completely statistically probable event happens and I impart [...]
Michael C. Hall discussed the European response to Dexter and how it differs from the American one. …people are fascinated. And I think in some markets overseas, they’re interested in the show in that it’s an American show, interested in what it might say or might not say about American culture, so that’s an added [...]
Yglesias makes a dynamite observation about part of the reason leaders of social conservatives put so much energy into anti-gay crusades rather than any of a number of other matters of social concern (via Patrick Appel): Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex [...]
John Wilkins has a good post on the value of our minds’ readinesses to defer to authorities from an evolutionary standpoint: The evolutionary justification for this is, of course the following: if evolution were a designer, trying to ensure that thinking beings learned and knew what they had to to survive, a cheaper rule than [...]
Francis Collins trots out a familiar old argument against atheism. The argument is that if there is no God then our morality is an illusion. Collins’s presentation of this argument features an unusual and suspicious spin. Collins knows that arguments can be made from evolutionary psychology that broadly moral thinking seems to have evolved in [...]
I appreciate Professor Harman’s willingness to exchange a couple rounds of debate with me across blogs against his stated desire to avoid such exchanges and so I will remain grateful to him even if we do not hear further reply from him. Here are his reasons for rejecting my notion of having a centralized message [...]
Graham Harman has an excellent (and lightning quickly delivered) reply up in response to my remarks earlier on the profession of philosophy looking into blogging as a preferred medium for more efficient and multi-vocal exchange. I’m quite grateful and want to address a few of his key observations and expand on some of my own [...]
I was so inspired by the story of Rwanda’s ability to overcome its genocides through a process of confession and forgiveness. Here is Fareed Zakaria and Rwandan President Paul Kagame from last Sunday. In the spirit of Zarathustra’s prescription: for human beings to be redeemed from revenge—that is for me the bridge to the highest [...]
I loathe witch hunts over people’s personal lives. What interests me are some observations on sincerity and hypocrisy which seem apparent to me watching the bizarrely unself-aware and narcissistic way that Sanford has acted as though he is a character in the Bible or some other morality tale in which he is the star. I [...]
An important looking new collection of articles on a crucial topic (especially for my dissertation) called Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy is coming out July1. It is co-edited by Ken Gemes and Simon May (whose book, Nietzsche’s War on Morality is one of the very best, if not the very best, books on Nietzsche’s ethics [...]
As the school psychologist during all my undergraduate years as at Grove City College, Warren Throckmorton counseled a couple of my friends about their closeted homosexuality. (I also visited Professor Throckmorton while a junior and an Evangelical Christian for probably three elective counseling sessions but for different reasons. I liked him a lot.) Here’s how [...]
Evangelos has asked and it’s a good question, so here’s a brief explanation: It’s a combination of two images in Nietzsche. The camel comes from “The Three Transformations,” a section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He is there describing transformations that the “spirit” must undergo. First it must become a camel. The camel represents austere, ascetic, [...]
Today, an excellent former student pushed me on the question of whether philosophy was more important than basic survival. I interpreted this question, at its core, to be whether freedom of thought is worth dying for. I think this because the right to philosophize for oneself is, at its core, the fundamental freedom of thought [...]
I’m really not sure that this is a very accurate inference about the nature of Nietzsche’s shift in writing style from his early works into his middle phase, but it’s interesting to ponder nonetheless: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping [...]
Thomas Huxley coined the word agnostic as a play on words. He was a philosopher who was irritated about the metaphysical presumptuousness of the philosophers around him who all seemed to know the secrets of the universe as though they had some special knowledge about things no one can really know about. He compared them, [...]