Monty Python - Philosophers' World Cup. Simon Blackburn - The Great Debate: Can Science Tell us Right From Wrong? (6) Bertrand Russell’s 10 commandments for teachers everyone with a brain. Bertrand Russell’s “Liberal Decalogue”… The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows: (via MetaFilter) The Better Angels of Our Nature — By Steven Pinker — Book Review. It is unusual for the subtitle of a book to undersell it, but Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature” tells us much more than why violence has declined. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard who first became widely known as the author of “The Language Instinct,” addresses some of the biggest questions we can ask: Are human beings essentially good or bad?
Has the past century witnessed moral progress or a moral collapse? Do we have grounds for being optimistic about the future? If that sounds like a book you would want to read, wait, there’s more. - StumbleUpon. WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD? Plato: For the greater good. Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability. Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue?
In such a manner is the princely chicken's dominion maintained. Albert Camus Books.
Nietzsche Quotes: Christianity. Christianity as antiquity.-- When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. From Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.405, R.J. Hollingdale transl. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life. from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, p.23, Walter Kaufmann transl.
Change of Cast. -- As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples. Speaking in a parable.
References. Logic. Philosophy Readings. Some Moral Dilemmas. The Trolley Problem, not in Grassian. Suggested by Philippa Foot (1920-2010), daughter of Esther, the daughter of President Grover Cleveland, but of British birth because of her father, William Sidney Bence Bosanquet. A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch or do nothing? This is a classic "right vs. good" dilemma. The Costly Underwater Tunnel Compare: 112 men were killed during the construction of Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border (the "official" number was 98, but others had died from causes more difficult to identify -- or easier to ignore -- like by carbon monoxide poisoning): The first to die was a surveyor, J.G.