Why is there something rather than nothing? This question includes God in its scope: if there is a God, then God is something, so we can always ask: why is there God rather than no God? This implies that the question cannot be answered by appealing to God. It can’t be answered by saying: because [...]
Steven Pinker compares current worries that the internet is changing how we think and making it more superficial to previous “moral panics” at the arrival of all other new media, from the printing press to newspapers to television. (And his examples might as well have gone all the way back to Plato’s mistrust of the [...]
Before we get to the philosophy this time, let’s enjoy my favorite Flaming Lips song: In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or [...]
In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices [...]
Biblical scholar and professor emeritus at the University of Sheffield, Philip Davies writes that the idea that religion bestows ethical value on human life is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. First he lays into the divine command theory throughout the Torah and proverbs as genuine routes to proper (or even defensible) moral motivation [...]
New on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an interesting article on Plato’s attempt to merge muthos and logos. Here’s the description: What the ancient Greeks—at least in the archaic phase of their civilisation—called muthos was quite different from what we and the media nowadays call “myth”. For them a muthos was a true story, a [...]
Earlier today I posted Brendan Palla’s reply to my posts on unconditional love and love in general. In what follows, I have interspersed my replies to him within the stream of his argument. I want to open with a bit of a critique. I don’t think you’ve captured very well the notion of unconditional love [...]
A week ago I posted twice on the theme of love, spending the first post on what I saw to be conceptual problems for the ideal of unconditional love and then focusing the second post on a constructive attempt to characterize love and then locating unconditional love within that new framework. The next day, Brendan [...]
Some day down the road, I hope to sift all my thoughts on empathy and “wise Latinas judges” in light of Nietzsche’s wealth of insights into perspectival knowledge as a more virile knowledge than the emasculation that comes through objectivity. (Genealogy of Morals III:12) But to hold us over in the meantime, here is Joseph [...]