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Milesabell

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Miles Abell

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Religion Without God by Ronald Dworkin. The New York Review Religion Without God The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion is too crude. Many millions of people who count themselves atheists have convictions and experiences very like and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a “personal” god, they nevertheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted.

They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily wonderful. There are famous and poetic expressions of the same set of attitudes. Judges often have to decide what “religion” means for legal purposes. We must turn to this challenge almost immediately. Copyright ©2013 by Ronald Dworkin. Interview with Ronald Dworkin. You might have heard the sad news of Ronald Dworkin’s death.

Interview with Ronald Dworkin

Here’s an interview he did with tpm a little more than a year ago. If you’re like most people, you think that judgements about politics, morality, living well, truth, beauty, and so on depend on separate, disconnected values. If you’re like most people, Ronald Dworkin disagrees with you. As a Greek parable has it, the fox knows many different things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Dworkin is a hedgehog, and the one big thing he knows is that value is unified. Many philosophers think, for example, that it’s at least reasonable to say that we can’t sensibly talk about what values are without considering different questions, such as “Are there values? “I think it’s a mistake is to think that those are different kinds of question,” Dworkin says, settling into a couch in his Belgravia home.

“The idea is that there are two kinds of questions. There is another foxy mistake out there too. “It’s a mistake to think that. Must We Mean What We Say? Stanley Cavell, born in 1926 and now 86 years old, is one of the greatest American philosophers of the past half-century.

Must We Mean What We Say?

He was also something of a musical prodigy and like many prodigies his accomplishments struck him as a matter of fraud. During his freshman year at Berkeley, he writes in Little Did I Know, his 2010 memoir, he walked into one of his first piano courses and was asked to prove he had the requisite chops by playing a piece on the spot. Not having practiced anything but jazz for years—this was 1944, and big band swing was at its peak—the budding pianist sat down at the bench, broke into a half-remembered theme from a Liszt impromptu, and “stopped playing as the theme was about to elaborate itself, as if I could have gone on to the end were there time and need.”

He could not have gone on to the end, nor even a note further, but his teacher, a brilliant young pianist with some of the look of Marlene Dietrich, was nonetheless taken in.

Social animals

Mind. Modern. Natura.