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Camille Contra Gaga: “The Death of Sex”

September 13, 2010 by Wes Alwan 16 Comments

Gaga as a teenager: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ke2JG5v5Y0. Camille Paglia will reveal in the Sunday Times that Lady Gaga is in fact bluffin' with her muffin: she's fake, antiseptic, and stripped of eroticism. It's an enjoyable irony that the moralizers of this generation must hearken back to those simpler, more innocent times like the ... 70s. Women were women, men were  Continue Reading …

No, It’s Not Just Semantics

September 9, 2010 by Wes Alwan 1 Comment

The paradigmatic philosophical debate concerns whether there is such a thing as philosophy at all. And if so, what it is. At Rationally Speaking, Massimo Pigliucci has an excellent post responding to the oh-so-common, Wittgenstein-inspired claim that philosophy is just a matter of confusion about language. (One species of this argument is that dualism is a "category mistake"  Continue Reading …

Hawking Keeps Hacking: “Philosophy is Dead”

September 7, 2010 by Wes Alwan 43 Comments

Apparently Stephen Hawking not only thinks that spontaneous creation from nothingness is somehow a scientific concept: he also claims that "philosophy is dead" (and as I point out, this is hardly surprising given the core anti-intellectualism lurking behind his amateur philosophizing). Here's a reaction from Burke's Corner: In his failure to exercise modesty in his pursuit  Continue Reading …

A Philosopher of Religion No Longer

September 7, 2010 by Wes Alwan Leave a Comment

Philosopher of Religion Keith Parson has had a change of heart (while he once took the arguments of theists seriously enough to argue against them, no longer): Over the past ten years I have published, in one venue or another, about twenty things on the philosophy of religion. I have a book on the subject, God and Burden of Proof, and another criticizing Christian  Continue Reading …

Stephen Hawking: “Nothing” has more explanatory value than “God”

September 7, 2010 by Wes Alwan 41 Comments

Stephen Hawking makes perhaps one of the dumbest forays by a scientist into philosophy that I have ever seen: That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe  Continue Reading …

More on the Metaphysical Implications of Quantum Mechanics

September 6, 2010 by Wes Alwan 8 Comments

Via Conor Friedersdorf blogging for Andrew Sullivan, here's a short Bloggingheads TV discussion on the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics: See the whole episode here and more here.  Continue Reading …

Philosophy & Kids Redux

September 4, 2010 by Seth Paskin 10 Comments

I'm not saying we are trendsetters.  I'm not saying the Philosophy Talk guys at Stanford are copycats.  I'm just saying that coincidentally, a mere month after I posted about whether children should be exposed to philosophy, they blogged about the same subject. Hey, they're from Stanford.  Older, wiser, more well-read, respected, smarter, better funded, more articulate -  Continue Reading …

Atheism in Theory and Praxis

September 3, 2010 by Seth Paskin 2 Comments

Christopher Hitchens, renowned and reviled Atheist, has cancer.  Needless to say, folks on both sides want to know how he's going to deal with it.  Enter Vanity Fair. Unanswerable Prayers What’s an atheist to think when thousands of believers (including prominent rabbis and priests) are praying for his survival and salvation—while others believe his cancer was divinely  Continue Reading …

Karen Armstrong on the “Ground Zero Mosque” and Sufism

August 25, 2010 by Wes Alwan Leave a Comment

Via Open Culture, religion scholar Karen Armstrong (whom Mark has discussed several times -- and who's book The Case for God may be the text for a future episode) comes out in favor of the "Ground Zero Mosque," noting that it would be a Sufi Mosque. "We all need a good dose of Sufi-ism," she says, and quotes Ibn Arabi, a twelfth-thirteenth century Sufi mystic, as saying: Do  Continue Reading …

Experimental Philosophy

August 20, 2010 by Wes Alwan 1 Comment

At the New York Times' Room for Debate some philosophy professors are discussing the following question: As philosophy departments have come under attack for being costly and impractical, do experimental methods, called "x-phi" by its proponents, offer new horizons for old problems? Or are they immaterial and a waste of time? Most of the participants note that Philosophy's  Continue Reading …

The Philosopher’s Annual

August 18, 2010 by Wes Alwan Leave a Comment

Philosopher's Annual selects what it takes to be the ten best philosophy in a given year and makes them available online. Leiter has a list of forthcoming 2009 selections, including two that look interesting to me: Selim Berker (Harvard), "The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience", Philosophy & Public Affairs 37:4, 293-329 James Dreier (Brown), "Relativism (and  Continue Reading …

Speaking of John Galt

August 13, 2010 by Wes Alwan Leave a Comment

McSweeney's does Rand: After all, we've managed to raise a bright, self-reliant girl who achieves her goals by means of incentive and ratiocination and never—or very rarely—through the corrupt syllogism of force. We know, despite what you and a number of other parents we've met have said—as they carried their whimpering little social parasites away—that Johanna's defiant,  Continue Reading …

The PhD, Visualized

August 10, 2010 by Wes Alwan 3 Comments

By: Wes Apparently getting a PhD is like trying to impregnate the nothingness beyond the periphery of a vast epistemological cosmos with ... a multi-colored logo-phallus.  Continue Reading …

The Partially Examined Latency Period: Saying things about what we believe and stuff

August 9, 2010 by Wes Alwan 4 Comments

By: Wes As a follow-up to Seth's post on teaching philosophy to children, I wanted to mention a New York Times article published in April on this subject: The Examined Life, Age 8. Second graders at a charter school in Springfiled, Mass. are being taught some philosophy via classic children's books like Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree (you'll notice that Amazon  Continue Reading …

Should children be exposed to Philosophy?

August 9, 2010 by Seth Paskin 4 Comments

I recently posted a review of Julian Baggini's Philosophy Monthly.  In his latest episode he covers a reenactment of the famous Monty Python's Philosophers' Football Match, for which there is a dedicated website, complete with video of the original.  It is, of course, FANTASTIC that someone has gone to the trouble of recreating the event ("...and Marx, claiming he was  Continue Reading …

Danto Sitting Around With Some Chick

June 3, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 3 Comments

For the second entry in the New York Times's series of online philosophy discussions, our friend Arthur Danto has posted an article about the MoMA's ongoing display of veteran performance artist Marina Abramovic. It describes this odd piece of performance art, wherein Marina sits on a chair in the museum with an empty chair across from her, and patrons can sit for as long as  Continue Reading …

Pathetically Rand

May 25, 2010 by Wes Alwan 4 Comments

Enough said: Rand clearly thought of herself as one of these creators. In an interview with Mike Wallace she declared herself "the most creative thinker alive." ... Two years later, Rand told Wallace that "the only philosopher who ever influenced me" was Aristotle. Otherwise, everything came "out of my own mind." She boasted to her friends and to her publisher at Random House,  Continue Reading …

Will Your Genes Marry Mine?

May 21, 2010 by Wes Alwan Leave a Comment

Slate reviews the latest excretion of pseudo-scientific, evolutionary psychology-based aspirational ethics, as incorporated into a marriage self-help book: Tara Parker-Pope, the earnest health reporter for the New York Times, promises a new wrinkle in the self-help genre with her book, For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage. Her basic premise is that there exists a vast,  Continue Reading …

The Times Takes on Philosophy

May 18, 2010 by Wes Alwan Leave a Comment

I've posted my take on the New York Times' new philosophy blog on Open Culture.  Continue Reading …

The Philosophy of Sarah Palin

May 18, 2010 by Wes Alwan Leave a Comment

Is it anything Like the Tao of Pooh? Andrew Sullivan quotes Slavoj Zizek's latest: Earlier generations of women politicians (Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, up to a point even Hillary Clinton) were what is usually referred to as "phallic" women: they acted as "iron ladies" who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be "more men than men  Continue Reading …

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