New to me: How to believe is a series in the Guardian (“Join our experts as they blog great works of religion and philosophy”). Here’s a summary of the topics so far (follow the link for more detail); looks good to me. Next up: Giles Fraser on Wittgenstein.
How to believe
Franklin Lewis: Rumi’s influence has long [...]
From Fr Marc, via Sr Juliann.
For our money is the Lord’s, however we may have gathered it. If we provide for those in need, we shall obtain great plenty. That is why God has allowed you to have more: not for you to waste on prostitutes, drink, fancy food, expensive clothes, and all other kinds [...]
Following up on my earlier Psalm 109 post with a bit of help from Fr Marc & Sr Juliann…
Juli reminded me of the term of art prooftexting. Borrowing from the Wikipedia article,
Prooftexting is the practice of using decontextualized quotations from a document (often, but not always, a book of the Bible) to establish a proposition. [...]
Christopher Lydon hosted a conversation with Harvey Cox, Mary Gordon and Cornell West at the Boston Book Festival last month, and the conversation showed up on Lydon’s Open Source Radio’s podcast. A little Lydon goes a long way, and there’s never just a little West, so I don’t necessarily recommend that you go listen to [...]
So, it’s Hallowe’en (and Samhain). Let’s give Andrew Brown the floor.
The Queen of Fairies caught me
Halloween was once a night of real fright, when the dead and the fairies walked close to us. How did that work?
And pleasant is the fairy land,
But, an eerie tale to tell,
Ay at the end of seven years,
We pay a [...]
Andrew Brown.
St Peter and the miserable worms | Andrew Brown
…
I think now McClatchey was right, and I was wrong to say that the Anglican Communion ended this week. The Anglican Communion actually ended at least 20 years ago, almost as soon as I started to write about it. There might be a federation of churches, [...]
Precognition | Andrew Brown
Just sometimes, science fiction comes out right; in 1928 a philosophy lecturer saw the 21st century clearly.
My daughter picked up a book on Greek philosophy in a second hand bookshop and when we turned to the section on Epicurus one passage leaped out. The author, a lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast, is [...]
Mark Liberman. I have mixed feelings about the concept. Sometimes it’s the critical clue that ends up under the rug.
Ockham’s broom
Yesterday in the Journal of Biology, the editor introduced a new series (Miranda Robertson, “Ockham’s broom“):
Although it is increasingly difficult to gauge what people can be expected to know, it is probably safe to assume [...]
Weekend reading from Bertrand Russell, 1932. Here’s his first paragraph; I hope you’re not so idle that you don’t read the whole thing.
Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: ‘Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.’ Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, [...]
John Stuart Mill was an early and strong advocate of universal suffrage, at a time when it was taken for granted that women, for example, did not vote. In Considerations on Representative Government, published in 1861, when the modern suffrage movement was just getting started, he wrote:
…it is a personal injustice to withhold from any [...]
xkcd is particularly profound:
Dinosaur Comics are my favorite comics. Today, anyway. If you’re not familiar with the DC conventions, go browse a few dozen; you won’t regret it.
Tomorrow my favorite may be Red Meat; it was, back on October 27, 1977, and it could be again. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
(If you want to see the reference [...]
Errol Morris reveals illusive truths in his essay, Seven Lies About Lying.
Because, of course, you can’t spell πράγματος without π.
Pi Day is also Einstein’s birthday, so we’ll take as our text for today, “I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.” I’ve been saving up a couple of links, so pay attention.
First, via Brad DeLong, Boltzmann’s Universe at Cosmic Variance.
Here’s how it goes. [...]
I note without really understanding an interesting new model where time is an emergent property rather than a fundamental feature of physics.
It is not reality that has a time flow, but our very approximate knowledge of reality. Time is the effect of our ignorance.
Time is so deeply fundamental to human experience that conceiving of reality [...]
Background: In a NY Times review of Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein, Jim Holt refers to Ludwig as “was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.” This inspired Brian Leiter to run a poll to “settle this once and for all” (answer: Wittgenstein by a narrow plurality). Harry Brighouse, at Crooked Timber, linked to [...]
I first came across Andrew Brown through his fine 1999 book The Darwin Wars (jacket blurb from Daniel Dennett: ‘I wouldn’t admit it if Andrew Brown were my friend. What a sleazy bit of trash journalism’).
Much of Brown’s beat has been coverage of religion (in the UK), and he approaches the subject with considerable sympathy. [...]
The line is from Gottlob Frege, I gather, though I just now came across it while reading David Chalmers. It’s new to me, though my brief career in academic philosophy centered on Wittgenstein, an admirer of Herr Frege.
Hesperus and Phosphorus are the latinized forms of the Greek personifications of the Evening and Morning Stars, respectively. [...]
Any blog named Pragmatos (including this one) must mark the passing of Richard Rorty.
I confess that I never found Rorty’s work all that congenial (I note that his Wikipedia entry has a reference to Henry, but not to William, James). Naetheless.
I’ve moved my blog to pragmatos.net; the previous address (http://lobitos.net/wordpress) will be redirected for the foreseeable future. The old RSS feed should still work (NetNewsWire will update the link automatically), but it’s probably advisable to update to the new one.
I’ve also updated WordPress to 2.0; painless, and so far so good.
Why pragmatos? In part, an [...]