Camille Paglia will reveal in the Sunday Times that Lady Gaga is in fact bluffin’ with her muffin. The thesis is about as tiresome — and unexciting — as Gaga herself.
No, It’s Not Just Semantics
It shouldn’t need saying that there’s a difference between linguistic and conceptual definitions, or that every system of knowledge rests on unproven axioms or assumptions — mathematics, logic, and science as much as philosophy. That’s why philosophical “meta discussions” about these fields — and knowledge in general — become genuinely interesting and problematic (rather than merely a matter of linguistic confusion or semantics), even while we know that that these problems don’t bear on their practical application.
Hawking Keeps Hacking: “Philosophy is Dead”
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).
A Philosopher of Religion No Longer
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).
Stephen Hawking: “Nothing” has more explanatory value than “God”
Stephen Hawking makes perhaps one of the dumbest forays by a scientist into philosophy that I have ever seen.
More on the Metaphysical Implications of Quantum Mechanics
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.
Philosophy & Kids Redux
The Philosophy Talk guys at Stanford University blog about teaching philosophy to the young. Which Seth posted about a month ago. Feel the Zeitgeist.
Atheism in Theory and Praxis
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 inspired, and hope Continue Reading …
Karen Armstrong on the “Ground Zero Mosque” and Sufism
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 Continue Reading …
Experimental Philosophy
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 use of evidence Continue Reading …
The Philosopher’s Annual
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 Expressivism) and the Problem of Disagreement”, Continue Reading …
Speaking of John Galt
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, quasi-bellicose nature only Continue Reading …
The PhD, Visualized
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.
The Partially Examined Latency Period: Saying things about what we believe and stuff
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?
The Philosophy Shop in the UK has a program to teach children philosophy – Seth asks whether that’s a useful and good thing.
Danto Sitting Around With Some Chick
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 Continue Reading …
Pathetically Rand
Citation of a Nation article about Ayn Rand from June 7, 2010.
Will Your Genes Marry Mine?
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, underappreciated repository of Continue Reading …
The Times Takes on Philosophy
I’ve posted my take on the New York Times’ new philosophy blog on Open Culture.
The Philosophy of Sarah Palin
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 themselves.”…Jacques-Alain Miller Continue Reading …