Author: Kenneth Taylor

  • Culture and Mental Illness

    Koro is mental disorder, characterized by a debilitating fear that that one’s genitals are retracting into ones body and that once they are fully retracted you will die. You don’t find many instances of in Western societies. But Southwest Asia koro epidemics have been known to break out. There was such an epidemic in 1984-85 in Guangdong, China. And between 997 and 2003 in several different West African nations, there were local outbreaks of koro-like panics.

  • What is a Wife?

    Why focus just on wives? What about husbands? And what about homosexual marriages? Why not be gender-neutral and politically correct? Why not ask: what is a spouse?

 
Beside the fact that it doesn’t have the same ring, our main answer is that neither the category “husband” nor the category “spouse” is as historically, culturally, or philosophically interesting as the category “wife.”

  • Fear!

    I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total…

  • The Post-Modern Family Values: Open Blog Entry

    One used to think of a family as one of the primary means of transmitting values from generation to generation. One might have thought, in fact, that that is one of the primary things that family is for. Of course, it has other functions — providing for its members daily material and psychological needs prime among them.

  • Work and the Self

    I said something during the episode that certainly could have been said more clearly about getting the proportions right. On the one hand, there’s how much of the time available to one, one’s work will take. There are only so many hours in a day, week, or life. How many of the hours of one’s day will one allow one’s work to consume? Work also consumes the self. And there’s only so much of the self to go around too.

  • Pornography: Open Thread

    Blogging has been light around here as of late — what with our gang’s various…

  • The Place of Scepticism and Sceptical Arguments

    I should start with a confession about my philosophical tastes. I tend not to find epistemology the most gripping of philosophical subjects. Roughly, epistemology has to do with the nature of knowledge. And a big part of epistemology historically has been devoted to answering the sceptic who challenges us to say whether and how we can know anything at all.

  • Thoughts on the Reader

    Thanks to everybody who made our  First Annual Dionysus Awards Show  such a success.  It was…

  • Separation of Powers and the Charismatic Presidency

    The founding fathers in their considerable wisdom took the separation of powers to be a “bulwark of liberty.” Indeed, they took the concentration of power into a single agency to be the very definition of tyranny. Conversely, they apparently believed that not just the formal separation of powers among the branches of the federal government and between the federal and state governments, but also what might be called the subsantive seperation of political interests to which the formally separated branches are asnwerable, was the key to a government that was unlikely to ever devolve into tyranny.

  • Dualism Strikes Back? Live Blogging!

    There’s almost no rational grounds for currently believing in old-fashioned Cartesian Dualism of the mind and body. According to that form of dualism, the mind and body were two metaphysically distinct substances — with the body being extended in space and the mind being an immaterial somewhat, with no extension, no location.