Conversations on the Intersection Between Faith and Science | Connecting the Dots The award-winning public radio program On Being, with Krista Tippett, has provided us with in-depth audio interviews on the intersection between faith and science with a range of guests including theoretical physicists and Vatican Observatory astronomers. Listen below and use the comments section to add your voice to the conversation. Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies on Einstein’s God Albert Einstein’s quip that “God does not play dice with the universe,” was about quantum physics, not a statement of faith. Janna Levin on Mathematics, Purpose and Truth As a theoretical physicist, Janna Levin probes whether the universe is finite or infinite. Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne on Asteroids, Stars and the Love of God Four Jesuits in history have had asteroids named after them. Uncovering the Codes for Reality with S. Are we in the matrix? Natalie Batalha on Exoplanets and Love: Science That Connects Us to One Another
Hume and Kant The 1700s saw many great thinkers who have left a lasting impact on modern philosophy and science -- and psychology. But there were two who would, between them, define the nature of science, especially psychology. They are, of course, David Hume and Immanuel Kant. David Hume was born April 26, 1711 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His family suggested he try law, and he tried, but found that it -- as he put it -- made him sick. Hume was the ultimate skeptic, convincingly reducing matter, mind, religion, and science to a matter of sense impressions and memories. I will let him speak for himself. All ideas are copies of impressions...it is impossible for us to think of anything which we have not antecedently felt by our senses.... And so...no matter! There are some philosophers (e.g. And no mind! There is no idea in metaphysics more obscure or uncertain than necessary connection between cause and effect. Out with cause and effect! So long, science! In 1752, he wrote Political Discourses. 1.
The Mortality Paradox by Maria Popova “Our overblown intellectual faculties seem to be telling us both that we are eternal and that we are not.” “It is quite impossible for a thinking being to imagine nonbeing, a cessation of thought and life,” Goethe, who ceased to be 181 years ago this week, proclaimed as he concluded that “in this sense, everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.” Since the dawn of time, it has been the human instinct to resolve the psychological dilemma by constructing various immortality narratives — one of the hallmarks of our species. In Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization (public library), Cambridge University philosopher Stephen Cave explores the inner workings of that ancient impulse, inviting us on a mind-bending, intense, at times unsettling and at times deeply comforting journey into the most cavernous quarters of the human psyche. The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the reality of our deaths we stumble. Share on Tumblr
Joshua Knobe & x-phi A new breed of thinkers takes the search for wisdom to the street. Josh Knobe has comfortable seating in his philosophy department office at Yale University—a small couch somewhere between a love seat and a sofa in size. It is most decidedly not, however, an armchair, which might seem a trivial distinction. But in Knobe's world, one's position on armchairs can be a matter of grave import. "Yeah, it's a couch rather than an armchair," says Knobe, '96. For the past century or so, philosophy has primarily entailed solitary ruminations to puzzle out deep truths about the nature of human existence—questions about reason, knowledge, values, free will. But Knobe is one of the leading lights of a new field called experimental philosophy, or "x-phi" for short. In many ways, Knobe is the closest thing experimental philosophy has to a rock star. Conducted in 2003, the experiment examined people's perception of intentionality based on their opinions about two scenarios. Let's take it to the streets
Intelligence: The Evolution of Night Owls IQs and Zs Night owls are smarter than other people, and now we may know why. The modern world contains many features our slow-to-evolve brains still find unfamiliar—cars, TVs, hot dogs on a stick. But the world has always thrown new stuff at us, and brighter humans may adapt more ably. Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at The London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that, while we have specialized mental modules for navigation, social interaction, and other age-old tasks, general intelligence is its own module handling only evolutionarily novel circumstances. A previous study found that evening people are smarter than morning people. Night Lights
What Does Lacan Say About… Desire? | LACANONLINE.COM Our desires are not our own, they are the Other’s There are two relatively straightforward ways in which we can understand one of Lacan’s most well-known maxims, that “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other”? (Seminar XI, p.235). Firstly, that desire is essentially a desire for recognition from this ‘Other’; secondly that desire is for the thing that we suppose the Other desires, which is to say, the thing that the Other lacks. In commenting on the way that desire repeats and insists through the transference and the signifier in psychoanalytic work, Lacan verifies our first reading, that desire is fundamentally a desire for recognition: In other words, desire pushes for recognition. So firstly our desire is a desire for recognition. We never fully know exactly what the Other desires or why it desires it, or in what way we ourselves might be implicated. “The object of man’s desire, and we are not the first to say this, is essentially an object desired by someone else.
Rosenhan experiment Experiment to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnosis Rosenhan's study was done in eight parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" (three women and five men, including Rosenhan himself) who briefly feigned auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 psychiatric hospitals in five states in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. The second part of his study involved an offended hospital administration challenging Rosenhan to send pseudopatients to its facility, whom its staff would then detect. While listening to a lecture by R. In a 2019 popular book on Rosenhan by author Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender, the veracity and validity of the Rosenhan experiment has been questioned. Pseudopatient experiment[edit] Rosenhan and the other pseudopatients reported an overwhelming sense of dehumanization, severe invasion of privacy, and boredom while hospitalized. Impact and controversy[edit]
Triple Nine Society The Triple Nine Society (TNS), founded in 1978, is a 501(c)(7) non-profit voluntary association of adults who have scored at or above the 99.9th percentile on specific IQ tests (or similar) under supervised conditions, which generally corresponds to an IQ of 149 or greater using a standard deviation of 16 (e.g. Stanford-Binet IV) and 146 or greater with a standard deviation of 15 (e.g. WAIS-IV, Stanford-Binet 5).[1] This compares with Mensa International, the better-known and larger membership high IQ society which admits applicants who score at or above the 98th percentile, which generally corresponds with an IQ score of 131 (SD 15) or 133 (SD 16), or greater. As of mid-March 2015, TNS reported over 1,500 members residing in more than 40 countries, with most members residing in the United States and Europe.[2] TNS publishes a journal entitled Vidya which contains articles, poetry and other creative content contributed by members conversant with a variety of subjects. References[edit]
Tutorial: Concrete vs. Abstract Thinking WHAT ARE CONCRETE AND ABSTRACT THINKING? Abstract thinking is a level of thinking about things that is removed from the facts of the “here and now”, and from specific examples of the things or concepts being thought about. Abstract thinkers are able to reflect on events and ideas, and on attributes and relationships separate from the objects that have those attributes or share those relationships. Thus, for example, a concrete thinker can think about this particular dog; a more abstract thinker can think about dogs in general. A concrete thinker can think about this dog on this rug; a more abstract thinker can think about spatial relations, like “on”. Rhetoric - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Painting depicting a lecture in a knight academy, painted by Pieter Isaacsz or Reinhold Timm for Rosenborg Castle as part of a series of seven paintings depicting the seven independent arts. This painting illustrates rhetorics. From Ancient Greece to the late 19th century, it was a central part of Western education, filling the need to train public speakers and writers to move audiences to action with arguments.[4] The word is derived from the Greek ῥητορικός (rhētorikós), "oratorical",[5] from ῥήτωρ (rhḗtōr), "public speaker",[6] related to ῥῆμα (rhêma), "that which is said or spoken, word, saying",[7] and ultimately derived from the verb ἐρῶ (erō), "say, speak".[8] Uses of rhetoric[edit] Scope of rhetoric[edit] Scholars have debated the scope of rhetoric since ancient times. Because the ancient Greeks highly valued public political participation, rhetoric emerged as a crucial tool to influence politics. However, since the time of Aristotle, logic has changed.
Nicholas Humphrey Nicholas Keynes Humphrey (born 1943) is an English psychologist, based in Cambridge, who is known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His interests are wide ranging. He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda, he was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" after brain damage in monkeys, he proposed the celebrated theory of the "social function of intellect" and he is the only scientist ever to edit the literary journal Granta. Humphrey played a significant role in the anti-nuclear movement in the late 1970s and delivered the BBC Bronowski memorial lecture titled "Four Minutes to Midnight" in 1981. His ten books include Consciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, A History of the Mind, Leaps of Faith, The Mind Made Flesh, Seeing Red, and Soul Dust. Family[edit] Humphrey is the son of the immunologist John H. Early career[edit] Nicholas Humphrey was educated at Westminster School (1956–61), and Trinity College, Cambridge (1961–67).
Leon Wieseltier Leon Wieseltier (/ˈwiːzəltɪər/; born June 14, 1952) is an American writer, critic, amateur philosopher and magazine editor. From 1983 to 2014, he was the literary editor of The New Republic. He is currently the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor and critic at The Atlantic. Life and career[edit] A child of Holocaust survivors,[1] Wieseltier was born in Brooklyn, New York, and attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush, Columbia University, Oxford University, and Harvard University. Wieseltier also edited and introduced a volume of works by Lionel Trilling entitled The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent and wrote the foreword to Ann Weiss's The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a collection of personal photographs that serves as a paean to pre-Shoah innocence. During Wieseltier's tenure as literary editor of The New Republic, many of his signed and unsigned writings appeared in the magazine. Criticism[edit]