Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Reading this article in the latest UU World, I was struck by just how true the central point is. I recognized the thought process immediately. I do have some leftover childhood imagination, and I find that almost everything I do with a margin of satisfaction has some of this kind of thinking behind [...]

It’s not as simple as we would like for it to be. And putting it under a microscope is an idea whose time has come…
There are so many money quotes in the linked article that I’m tempted to copy & paste the whole thing here. I know… my job is supposed [...]

Something everyone should understand. Proof is not for the real world. An excellent post from Sean at Cosmic Variance pounds this point home quite well.
So well, in fact, that I have little to add. But the discussion can continue from where Sean leaves it. After we’ve established that we don’t believe [...]

Dan Harper briefly addresses what I think is among the more pivotal points about religion in the context of debate about its value, here… namely, that religion doesn’t necessarily mean “belief” (about God, the supernatural, etc… or about objective reality at all, per se).
In fact, I think that one of the tasks religion is most [...]

NYT on primate’s moral building blocks.
Very interesting stuff about what amounts to a relatively new field of research in biology - and one that may have strong implications for philosophy. Fun stuff. I’ll try to come back & update this post with some interesting excerpts & maybe even a comment. (Update: the [...]

This teapot sized tempest got me thinking. I think it really does all depend on what qualifies as “real”, “knowledge”, blah blah blah. Take this simple test, and then spend the rest of the day wondering why you did:
1. a) Do you agree that the Mona Lisa is good art?
[...]

Another angle on the religion thing.

I was reading Simon Blackburn’s book, Being Good, last night (I’m a big fan of his other popular book, Think), and I ran across a quotation from David Hume’s An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals:

When a man denominates another his enemy, his rival, his antagonist, his adversary, he is understood to speak the language [...]