Martin Heidegger is the Continental philosopher most analytic philosophers love to hate. I actually never knew enough about Heidegger to form much of an opinion. I knew that he said that “Nothings noths” (Das Nichts nichtet), giving Carnap a paradigm of meaningless, unverifiable, unfalsifiable, metaphysical gibberish.
This week, we’re thinking about the relationship between science and politics. Are they friends or foes? I can get myself in a cynical frame of mind in which I think to myself that whether they are friends or foes depends on where the money is. I’m kidding – sort of.
The classical view on the relationship between ethics and rulership can be traced back to…
The notion of ideology is very important in political thought, as well as in everyday…
This week, we’re thinking about Propaganda – how it works, why it matters. I feel about propaganda sort of the way I feel about pornography — I’m not exactly sure how to define it, but I definitely know it when I see it.
How do we get from noise to meaning? Well, however we do it, the…
I should start out by admitting that unconditional love is rare and difficult thing. Parents may profess to love their children unconditionally. But how often do children test the limits of parental love? Couples in the first blush of new love may make dewy-eyed promises to love each other for better or for worse. But how often do such promises give way to betrayal and recrimination? Still, it’s an amazing gift when it does happen. And it’s one that we all want. We all want someone who will love us forever, through thick and thin, no matter what we do or become.
Maybe you don’t believe in reincarnation. But a lot of people have and still do. Schopenhauer said, “we find the doctrine [of reincarnation] springing from the earliest and noblest ages of the human race, always spread abroad on the earth as the belief of the great majority of mankind.”
Philosophical discussions about torture tend to focus on two things: whether torture is ever morally justified, and, if so, whether this should be reflected in the law. Such discussion tend to focus on extreme cases: torture the terrorist or let the bomb go off and injure hundreds or thousands of innocents.
The Famen Buddhist Temple (in what is now Shaanxi Province, in the People’s Republic of…
A new multi-level model of ethics and morality has recently been announced, as schematically depicted…
The concept of wilderness is a human invention, and it’s built on myths. Taken literally, the concept doesn’t apply to anything at all. There’s no place left on Earth that’s entirely untouched by the hand of man—not even Antarctica, or the depths of the Pacific.
There is an approach to learning that is corroding education, especially higher education, in the…
This week we’re asking about Morality in a Godless World. There may or may not…
In the hit musical Next to Normal, a climactic scene portrays Diana Goodman, the lead…
This week we’re thinking about Democracy in Crisis. Now if we’re talking about American Democracy,…