http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-stone/
How much does it matter whether God exists? — Aeon O... Alan/Flickr Two rooms, in two different cities, but pretty much the same scene: one man stands before a few dozen supporters, many of them middle-aged white males, plus a smaller, precocious cohort in early adulthood. As the man speaks, they interrupt him with good, earnest, detailed questions, which he ably answers more or less to their satisfaction. PN Review Online Poetry Literary Magazine - The Freezing Coachman: some reflections on art and morality - Raymond Tallis - PN Review 96 Tolstoy tells the story of an aristocratic woman at the theatre weeping at the imaginary tragedy enacted on the stage. At the same time, outside in the cold, a real tragedy is taking place: her old and faithful coachman, awaiting her in the bitter winter night, is freezing to death. The point of the story is obvious: art does not necessarily make people better behaved, or more considerate. The dissociation between art and good behaviour angered Tolstoy and, in What is Art?, he savagely attacked what he perceived as the contemporary reduction of art to a mere amusement, recreation or opiate for the leisured classes.
“Gender is not a binary, it’s a spectrum”: some problems – More radical with age An oft-repeated mantra among proponents of the notion of gender identity is that “gender is not a binary, it’s a spectrum”. The basic idea is that what makes gender oppressive is not, as the radical feminist analysis would have it, that it is an externally imposed set of norms prescribing and proscribing behaviour to individuals in accordance with morally arbitrary biological characteristics, and coercively placing them in one of two positions in a hierarchy. Rather, the problem is that we recognise only two possible genders. Philosophers want to know why physicists believe theories they can’t prove — Quartz It’s often assumed that physics and philosophy are at opposite ends of the academic spectrum. In fact, they’re close—so close that they can overlap, with professors sometimes switching between the two fields as they work to advance our understanding of highly abstract subjects in theoretical physics. One such professor is Richard Dawid, a philosophy of science researcher at Ludwig Maximilian Universität Munich, who has a PhD in theoretical physics and began his career researching particle physics. He transitioned to philosophy, he tells Quartz, to investigate how physicists can come to believe in certain theories without necessarily having the empirical evidence that proves them.
Czeslaw Milosz: the Moralist and the Philosopher The Moralist and the Philosopher Short-story writer and philosopher Milosz’s poetry brings also thoughts of philosophical and moral character. Put in the foreground one can find the problem of the disintegration of the Universe based on religion, constant search for God and peace and inner order
Syncretism Syncretism (/ˈsɪŋkrətɪzəm/) is the combining of different beliefs, while blending practices of various schools of thought. Syncretism involves the merging or assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths. Syncretism also occurs commonly in expressions of arts and culture (known as eclecticism) as well as politics (syncretic politics). Nomenclature[edit] Diogenes of Sinope ancient Greek Cynic philosopher from Sinope Diogenes was a controversial figure. His father minted coins for a living, and Diogenes was banished from Sinope when he took to debasement of currency.[1] After being exiled, he moved to Athens and criticized many cultural conventions of the city. He modelled himself on the example of Heracles, and believed that virtue was better revealed in action than in theory.
Consequentialism - Opposing Viewpoints in Context As a name for any ethical theory or for the class of ethical theories that evaluate actions by the value of the consequences of the actions, "consequentialism" thus refers to classical utilitarianism and other theories that share this characteristic. Classical utilitarianism, in the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, was consequentialist, judging actions right in proportion as they tended to produce happiness, wrong as they tended to produce pain. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries much of the criticism of utilitarianism was directed at the hedonistic value theory on which the ethical theory was founded.
the Front Page of the Internet In addition to the examples given below, I have two more: Scott Atran and Bruce Schneier. Atran is an anthropologist and cognitive scientist who has written and researched extensively on the link between religion and terrorism. Schneier is a security expert, and tremendously well-respected in the field, having worked for the DoD, Harvard, and several other private institutions. He coined the term 'security theater'. Harris has engaged both in debate; Atran on stage and Schneier via e-mail. Atran is the first example.
New Atheism - Wikipedia Contemporary atheistic movement of thinkers and writers New Atheism lends itself to and often overlaps with secular humanism and antitheism, particularly in its criticism of what many New Atheists regard as the indoctrination of children and the perpetuation of ideologies founded on belief in the supernatural. Some critics of the movement characterize it as "militant atheism" or "fundamentalist atheism".
The Origin of the Work of Art - Wikipedia The Origin of the Work of Art (German: Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes) is an essay by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger drafted the text between 1935 and 1937, reworking it for publication in 1950 and again in 1960. Heidegger based his essay on a series of lectures he had previously delivered in Zurich and Frankfurt during the 1930s, first on the essence of the work of art and then on the question of the meaning of a "thing," marking the philosopher's first lectures on the notion of art. Content[edit] Too Many Values? Intolerance, Anti-Relativism and Richard Rorty — IIIIXIII Anti-relativists fear that accepting too many values will lead to a kind of entropy of values, or as Clifford Geertz has put it: a “heat death of the mind”. To anti-relativists, an equal appreciation and accommodation of values means it will be impossible to tell right from wrong and the significant from the insignificant. To critics, relativism is the annihilation of judgment itself. For some of them, it is even the annihilation of humanity. Philosopher Ian Jarvie writes that “by limiting critical assessment of human works, [relativism] disarms us, dehumanises us, leaves us unable to enter into communicative interaction; that is to say, unable to criticize cross-culturally, cross-sub-culturally”.
Western logic has held contradictions as false for centuries. Is that wrong? Since Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Western philosophers and logicians have, with few exceptions, viewed contradictions as unacceptable, simply incapable of being true. But certain logical paradoxes demonstrate that some contradictions aren’t so easily dismissed as merely false, an idea that some Eastern philosophical traditions have grappled with more successfully. In this instalment of Aeon In Sight, the US-based British philosopher Graham Priest explains how the Liar Paradox – debated since antiquity – can upend the traditional Western view that all contradictions must be false. Producer: Kellen Quinn