David Eagleman and his 40 afterlives | Interview | Science | The Observer. In one of the stories in David Eagleman's first work of fiction, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Canongate), God consoles himself for the mess that is humankind by reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In another, people pay vast sums to ensure the glamorous afterlife they desire, only to find themselves marooned in the most cliched version of heaven, where they sit on white clouds, clad in ill-fitting white robes, strumming harps.
By day, Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he specialises in the study of time perception and synesthesia. He also directs the college's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. Sum is his first foray into fiction – but it has become a word-of-mouth bestseller and earned him plaudits from Stephen Fry and Brian Eno, who called it "as surprising a book as I've read in years". What leads a neuroscientist to tackle the idea of the afterlife? I think so. That's right. I think so. I'm not certain. What Does Bernard Lonergan Mean by Conversion.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Epicurus Epicurus is one of the major philosophers in the Hellenistic period, the three centuries following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E. (and of Aristotle in 322 B.C.E.). Epicurus developed an unsparingly materialistic metaphysics, empiricist epistemology, and hedonistic ethics. Epicurus taught that the basic constituents of the world are atoms, uncuttable bits of matter, flying through empty space, and he tried to explain all natural phenomena in atomic terms. Epicurus rejected the existence of Platonic forms and an immaterial soul, and he said that the gods have no influence on our lives. Epicurus also thought skepticism was untenable, and that we could gain knowledge of the world relying upon the senses. Table of Contents 1. Epicurus was born around 341 B.C.E., seven years after Plato's death, and grew up in the Athenian colony of Samos, an island in the Mediterranean Sea. After Epicurus' death, Epicureanism continued to flourish as a philosophical movement. 2. 3.
A. B. C. G. E. Moore (British philosopher. David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain. When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground.
David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. Eagleman is thirty-nine now and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston. If Eagleman’s body bears no marks of his childhood accident, his mind has been deeply imprinted by it. The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. Still, they agreed to give it a try. Utilitarianism (philosophy) : Criticisms. Criticisms One such criticism is that, although the widespread practice of lying and stealing would have bad consequences, resulting in a loss of trustworthiness and security, it is not certain that an occasional lie to avoid embarrassment or an occasional theft from a rich person would not have good consequences and thus be permissible or even required by utilitarianism.
But the utilitarian readily answers that the widespread practice of such acts would result in a loss of trustworthiness and security. To meet the objection to not permitting an occasional lie or theft, some philosophers have defended a modification labelled “rule” utilitarianism. It permits a particular act on a particular occasion to be adjudged right or wrong according to whether it is in accordance with or in violation of a useful rule, and a rule is judged useful or not by the consequences of its general practice. Teleological ethics (philosophy.
The History of Utilitarianism. First published Fri Mar 27, 2009 Utilitarianism is one of the most powerful and persuasive approaches to normative ethics in the history of philosophy. Though not fully articulated until the 19th century, proto-utilitarian positions can be discerned throughout the history of ethical theory.
Though there are many varieties of the view discussed, utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many ways to spell out this general claim. One thing to note is that the theory is a form of consequentialism: the right action is understood entirely in terms of consequences produced. The Classical Utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, identified the good with pleasure, so, like Epicurus, were hedonists about value.
Utilitarianism is also distinguished by impartiality and agent-neutrality. 1. Gay's influence on later writers, such as Hume, deserves note. 2. 2.1 Jeremy Bentham.