Cullen Murphy - Inside the heresy files. On a hot autumn day in Rome not long ago, I crossed the vast expanse of St Peter’s Square, paused momentarily in the shade beneath a curving flank of Bernini’s colonnade and continued a little way beyond to a Swiss Guard standing impassively at a wrought-iron gate. He examined my credentials, handed them back and saluted smartly. I hadn’t expected the gesture and almost returned the salute instinctively, but then realised it was intended for a cardinal waddling into the Vatican from behind me.
Just inside the gate, at Piazza del Sant’Uffizio 11, stands a Renaissance palazzo with a ruddy ochre-and-cream complexion. This is the headquarters of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose job, in the words of the Apostolic Constitution Pastor bonus, promulgated in 1988 by Pope John Paul II, is “to promote and safeguard the doctrine on faith and morals throughout the Catholic world”. Any archive is a repository of what some sliver of civilisation has wrought, for good or ill. Neuroscience Challenges Old Ideas about Free Will. Do we have free will? It is an age-old question which has attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians, lawyers and political theorists. Now it is attracting the attention of neuroscience, explains Michael S.
Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of the new book, “Who’s In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain.” He spoke with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Cook: Why did you decide to tackle the question of free will? Gazzaniga: I think the issue is on every thinking person’s mind. Now, after 50 years of studying the brain, listening to philosophers, and most recently being slowly educated about the law, the issue is back on my front burner.
Cook: What makes you think that neuroscience can shed any light on what has long been a philosophical question? Gazzaniga: Philosophers are the best at articulating the nature of a problem before anybody knows anything empirical. Druckversion - Habermas, the Last European: A Philosopher's Mission to Save the EU - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. Jürgen Habermas is angry. He's really angry. He is nothing short of furious -- because he takes it all personally. He leans forward. He leans backward. He arranges his fidgety hands to illustrate his tirades before allowing them to fall back to his lap. He bangs on the table and yells: "Enough already! " "I'm speaking here as a citizen," he says. Enough already! Jürgen Habermas, 82, wants to get the word out. Usually he says clever things like: "In this crisis, functional and systematic imperatives collide" -- referring to sovereign debts and the pressure of the markets.
Sometimes he shakes his head in consternation and says: "It's simply unacceptable, simply unacceptable" -- referring to the EU diktat and Greece's loss of national sovereignty. 'No Convictions' And then he's really angry again: "I condemn the political parties. It's in the nature of this crisis that philosophy and bar-room politics occasionally find themselves on an equal footing. Habermas wants to get his message out. The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers. All revolutionaries want their stories told to the world, and no one has conveyed the hopes and dreams of Egyptians more vividly than Alaa Al Aswany. The dentist turned author rose to fame with his 2002 novel, The Yacoubian Building, which charted Egypt's cultural upheaval and gradual dilapidation since throwing off its colonial shackles.
Aswany used his prominence to help found the Kefaya political movement, which first articulated the demands that would energize the youth in Tahrir Square: an end to corruption, a rejection of hereditary rule, and the establishment of a true democratic culture. For his political activism, Aswany was blacklisted by Egypt's state-owned publishing houses, and security officials harassed the owner of the cafe where he met with young writers.
How times change. Aswany was a fixture in Tahrir Square during Egypt's uprising -- he was almost killed three times, he said, during the running battles between demonstrators and pro-Mubarak thugs. John Ritter. Intellectuals and Politics. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The Stone is featuring occasional posts by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, that apply critical thinking to information and events that have appeared in the news. The rise of Newt Gingrich, Ph.D.— along with the apparent anti-intellectualism of many of the other Republican candidates — has once again raised the question of the role of intellectuals in American politics. In writing about intellectuals, my temptation is to begin by echoing Marianne Moore on poetry: I, too, dislike them.
But that would be a lie: all else equal, I really like intellectuals. What is an intellectual? In his “Republic,” Plato put forward the ideal of a state ruled by intellectuals who combined comprehensive theoretical knowledge with the practical capacity for applying it to concrete problems. A utopian fantasy? _lygazczg0T1qzwkt2o1_1280.jpg (JPEG Image, 800 × 1067 pixels) - Scaled (58. _lpelvrzwnj1qm1l9go1_1280.jpg (JPEG Image, 553x698 pixels) - Scaled (84. _lprkj895821qzwaddo1_500.jpg (JPEG Image, 500x665 pixels) - Scaled (93%) 36498702.jpg (JPEG Image, 795x800 pixels) - Scaled (77%) _locwhv0MIR1qbavd3o1_400.jpg (JPEG Image, 300x450 pixels)