Philosophy

The April/May issue of Philosophy Now was devoted to the question Is God Really Dead? Many articles, though not all, expressed an atheistic perspective.
What is Atheism?
Ernest Nagel: “I shall understand by ‘atheism’ a critique and a denial of the major claims of all varieties of theism” (6). But, as Cliteur points out, this is “clearly […]

In his introduction to Volume 1 of Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action Thomas McCarthy explains how Habermas responds to what he calls “the decline of the paradigm of consciousness” by making a shift to “the paradigm of language.” What does he mean by this?
Philosophical thought in the early modern period has been dominated by […]

Raymond Tallis’ Michelangelo’s Finger is an enjoyable read, as I’ve indicated in previous posts. One of the major points he makes is that the self-consciousness of humans is unique in five respects:

It is uniquely sustained.
It is uniquely complex.
It is unique as to its contents.
It is uniquely stitched together internally both within a moment and between […]

From previous blogs we have noted the conclusion of Plantinga’s analysis: “that the existence of God is compatible, both logically and probabilistically, with the existence of evil; thus it solves the main philosophical problem of evil.”
Plantinga gives some space to considering another atheological approach that is now somewhat outdated, namely verificationism. As Plantinga explains:
This is […]

In the April/May issue of Philosophy Now (”Is God Really Dead?”) Victor Stenger insists science does have something to say about God and the supernatural (12). Stenger’s own reading causes him to conclude that the majority of believing scientists accept Gould’s view that science and religion are non-overlapping spheres (12). I am not in any […]

Pointing is a very complex means of communication. Tallis illustrates why this is the case:
in order to locate the pointee, the consumer [sc. the recipient; the one being communicated to via pointing] has to assume the position of the producer [sc. the one doing the pointing]. Clearly we do this mentally, not bodily, though when pointing […]

In his stimulating book Michelangelo’s Finger, Raymond Tallis discusses the significance of pointing:
Pointing is a means of indicating a transcendent world - general, hidden and shared - and takes us decisively out of our solitary, transient bodies, subject to the laws of nature.
He convincingly demonstrates throughout the book that humans are utterly unique and are […]

In a famous 18th century romance written by Lesage, Gil Blas “finds it possible to become a skilled physician in the twinkling of an eye, when Dr. Sangrado has imparted to him the secret that the remedy for all diseases is to be found in bleeding the patient and in making him drink copiously of […]

I’m struggling to come to grips with the thought of one of the most influential modern-day philosophers, Jurgen Habermas. Recently I bought his two large volumes on The Theory of Communicative Action and am gradually working my way through Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society.
In the Introduction, the translator of this work, Thomas […]

Sartre expresses his concept of freedom through his key character Mathieu in The Reprieve:
He walked on a few steps, stopped again, sat down on the parapet, and watched the water flowing past. What shall I do with all this freedom? What shall I do with myself? His future lay marked out by definite tasks: the […]

Sartre expresses his existential notions of freedom through his key character Mathieu in The Reprieve:
Outside. Everything is outside: the trees on the quay, the two houses by the bridge that lend a pink flush to the darkness, the petrified prance of Henri IV’s steed above my head; solid objects, all of them. Inside - nothing, […]

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy there are obvious affinities between Sartre and his lead character, Mathieu. At one point in The Reprieve, the second book in the series, with the threat of war hanging in the air, Mathieu looks up from a cafe terrace and sees “a fine new church, white against the […]

One of the most supreme ironies of atheistic philosophy is represented by Sartre. Having swept God aside as at best an irrelevancy, Sartre makes a fundamental distinction between unconscious being and conscious being. Unconscious being he dubs “being-in-itself” and conscious being “being-for-itself.” With respect to human beings Sartre insists that a person has no predetermined […]

There are some strong affinities between the thought of the fourth century BC Greek philosopher Epicurus and Buddhist philosophy, insofar as Epicurus also identified suffering as the fundamental problem and sought to overcome it, attaining a state of perfect mental calmness and peace that he called ataraxeia. Projecting such wish thinking into the future, Epicurus argued that […]

Simon Critchley makes much of the death of David Hume. Being an atheist the question concerned whether he would want to convert to Christianity on his death-bed. Boswell visited him twice and asked him, “Don’t you at least accept the possibility of an after-life.” Hume refused to believe it, making the rejoinder, “It’s possible if […]

I was re-listening to a Philosopher’s Zone podcast with Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers. Critchley opened up with an amusing anecdote about philosopher A.J. Ayer. Ayer was suffering from pneumonia and had a near-death experience after choking on a piece of smoked salmon, when his heart stopped beating for about four minutes. […]

I was re-reading Bertrand Russell’s “Introduction” to A History of Western Philosophy and a number of things struck me about Russell’s foundational assumptions:
1. In the very first paragraph Russell recognises that a philosophy is a product of two factors: (a) inherited religious and ethical conceptions; (b) ’scientific’ investigation, broadly understood. He also observes that philosophers […]

Sartre’s The Reprieve covers eight days in the lives of various people in France before the signing of the Munich Agreement, soon followed by the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Frenchmen are being called up for military service. In this context Sartre invites us to overhear Mathieu’s conversation with his brother Jacques:
Mathieu returned and sat […]

In Philosophy Now (Sept/Oct 2009) Raymond Tallis argues against the idea that mind and brain are the same thing. Here he distinguishes between necessary and sufficient conditions. To use his example: it is a necessary condition of Tallis being knocked down by a 97 bus in London that he must be in London. But this […]

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), founder of analytical psychology, wrote voluminously, 18 volumes of Collected Works and secondary commentary. Jung was a highly influential figure. He was a psychiatrist who became a psychotherapist. But he was also a cultural commentator and quasi-mystic. His doctoral research involved investigating a medium, his maternal cousin, Hélène Preiswerk.
Jung was intensely […]

Yesterday on the way to work I was listening to a podcast by atheistic philosopher, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, based at Duke University in North Carolina. He was ridiculing the idea that you have to have a God in order to have morality. There were many aspects of his reasoning I found suspect, including the way he […]

In the movie The Maltese Cross, Humphrey Bogart plays the role of Dashiell Hammett’s famous hard-nosed detective, Sam Spade. Hammett’s world is a godless world, ruled by chance and violence with individuals being alone in a meaningless world. Macbeth lives in a similar kind of world. Macbeth is a tragic figure. Michael Rockler sees Macbeth […]

I like this quote I picked up from recently deceased Polish philosopher, Lesek Kolakowski:
Every work of man is a compromise between the material and the tool. Tools are never quite equal to their tasks, and none is beyond improvement. Aside from differences in human skill, the tool’s imperfection and the material’s resistance together set the […]

In Being and Nothingness Sartre presents his depressing view of individual freedom grounded in self-limited epistemology and drowning in a merciless sea of subjectivity:
…I can say of Pierre, who is dead: “He loved music.” In this case, the subject like the attribute is past. There is no living Pierre in terms of which this past-being […]

Nigel Warburton, immediately before interviewing Marilyn McCord Adams, comments that there is no greater challenge to religious belief than the problem of evil. If there is an all-powerful, all-good God then why does he allow such terrible suffering in the world?
It is perhaps Warburton’s view that the problem of evil is the greatest challenge to […]

In What Has Jerusalem To Do With Beijing? Yeo Khiok-khng points out that one of main presuppositions of yin-yang philosophy is that cosmology is more important than anthropology. He comments:
A true understanding of the self is not attained merely by studying oneself, but requires studying the self in relation to the larger whole in which […]

In Being and Nothingness. Sartre contends,
Values in actuality are demands which lay claim to a foundation.
He goes on to explain that:
[value] can be revealed only to an active freedom which makes it exist as value by the sole fact of recognizing it as such. It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and […]

There are two aspects of Kant’s philosophy which came under attack. His synthetic a priori  - his contention that some things can be established by reason alone that are not just tautologies (true by definition) - was rejected by G.E. Moore, Wittgenstein, Logical Positivists and the Vienna Circle, all representing the Analytic tradition of philosophy. […]

Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism have long stood against the idea that truth can be apprehended through reason. At best reason is akin to a boat that one uses to get to a certain desired point in the process after which it can be left behind.
Yet even in Western philosophy cultural factors throw considerable […]

Immanuel Kant once observed, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” One of the most accessed blogs in the world, Crooked Timber, is based on this quote.
I have not been able to track down as yet the source of Kant’s statement and I am not sure exactly what he meant. I […]

I must confess I have a lot of sympathy for Jeremy Bentham’s regard for natural rights:
Right… is the child of law; from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.
Natural rights is […]

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy defines paternalism as “the power or authority one person or institution exercises over another to confer benefits or prevent harm for the latter regardless of the latter’s informed consent.” However, Seana V. Shiffrin argues that all that is necessary for paternalism to occur is for the the paternalist to take […]

Summarising Plantinga’s approach to this question, we began with four propositions:
1. God is omnipotent
2. God is wholly good
3. God is omniscient
4. Evil exists
It has never been shown that this logical set is implicitly inconsistent. Yet it does not necessarily follow that it is implicitly consistent. Can it be shown that there is in fact no inconsistency here?
Plantinga begins by considering […]

Following Plantinga, we have seen that no explicit or formal contradiction is involved in the following propositions:
1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is wholly good.
and
3. Evil exists.
We considered an attempt to demonstrate an implicit contradiction by adding the following two propositions:
4c. An omnipotent and omniscient good being eliminates every evil that it can properly eliminate.
and
5. There are no limits to […]

Following Plantinga, we have seen that no explicit or formal contradiction is involved in the following propositions:
1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is wholly good.
and
3. Evil exists.
We considered an attempt to demonstrate an implicit contradiction by adding the following two propositions:
4a. Every good thing always eliminates evil that it knows about and can eliminate.
and
5. There are no limits to what […]

Following Plantinga, we have seen that no explicit or formal contradiction is involved in the following propositions:
1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is wholly good.
and
3. Evil exists.
We considered Mackie’s attempt to demonstrate an implicit contradiction by adding the following two propositions:
4. A good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can.
and
5. There are no limits to what an omnipotent being […]

At this point we need to recall the example containing three propositions concerning the ages of George, Paul and Nick. To demonstrate that these were implicitly contradictory another proposition(s) had to be added that was necessarily true. Since the fourth proposition clearly was of this nature there was no doubt that the three propositions did […]

In God, Freedom and Evil Alvin Plantinga distinguishes between various kinds of contradictions and argues that it is not possible to construct a logical set that demonstrates there is a contradiction between the reality of evil, on the one hand, and God’s goodness, omnipotence, omniscience, on the other.
The typical function of natural theology, involving philosophical […]

Midgley rejects Dawkinism, which Dawkins erroneously assumes to be Darwinism, when Dawkins dismisses as preposterous the notion that there is any meaning or purpose to existence. Dawkins believes that there is no such thing as justice, no evil and no good.
Midgley argues that even in a purely naturalistic universe the terms “good” and “evil” have […]

Over 5 years Debra Trione interviewed 60 of America’s most powerful and influential people - in politics, law, business, the military and publishing - regarding their visions of a perfect world. In doing so she used a unique and, indeed, rather peculiar interview technique.
Trione began with broad questions such as: “Name two things you hope will be true […]

In the editorial for the January/February edition of Philosophy Now, Grant Bartley reports on the results of a survey among their well-educated and presumably scientifically-aware readers. When asked, “Is there a God?” 52% said Yes, 31% No and 17% Don’t Know - an overall majority for God.
This particular issue was entitled Darwin & Friends, given […]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, insists that when a person makes a decision this does not involve acting on ‘raw beliefs’ about the situation in question, nor on what probabilitists call ‘degrees of belief’, but rather on the possible consequences as perceived by that person. He maintains,
Perception of impact, that is, of […]

It was the view of Ernst Cassirer that humans are unique in the animal kingdom since they are the only beings with a “symbolic imagination and intelligence.” Human symbols transcend the things referred to and involve conception. People mentally react to their symbols. Cassirer argued that “instead of defining man as an animal rationale, we […]

Poseidonius spoke of man’s “second nature” in expressing his view that by nature people are indispensably dependent on culture. Johann Herder followed suit but adding his view that the development of language and culture is necessitated by human deficiencies and incompleteness.
Helmuth Plessner explained the development of culture as arising from what he termed “homelessness” and “excentricity”, […]

Existentialism is committed to the principle that existence precedes essence. This means that we, through our own actions and choices (existence) determine our own nature (essence). Simone de Beauvoir qualified this by her distinction between “in-itself” and “for-itself.” She recognised that both of these dimensions are found in people and accounts for what she described […]

Peter Abbs identifies Jean-Jacques Rousseau as “the first significant philosopher of deep personal autobiography” (”The Full Revelation of the Self” in Philosophy Now [July/August 2008] 17). Rousseau contrasted himself with other Enlightenment philosophers:
I have met many men who were more learned in their philosophising, but their philosophy remained, as it were, external to them. Wanting […]

It was Nietzsche’s understanding that Christianity was essentially repressive. He assumed that initially man in his state of natural innocence simply followed his instincts. Judeo-Christian religion has damaged this with its emphasis on guilt and repression. Indeed, as Cathal Horan points out, for Nietzsche it is this repression of instincts which explains the evolution of […]

I was listening to a podcast some time back (I’ve forgotten the source) which described Nietzsche as perhaps the most art-obsessed philosopher of all time. Apparently, he saw himself as a poet and composer, though others found it difficult to share this opinion. Nietzsche believed that the pre-Socratic ancient Greeks used art to deal with […]

Barbara and I are currently reading Ecclesiastes. The book begins:
“Meaningless! Meaningless! ” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless” (1:2).
This theme permeates the book. For example, we read:
I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind (1:14).
Then I applied myself to the […]

In a stimulating article (”Wilde and Morality” in Philosophy Now 65 [Jan-Feb 08] 28-30) Peter Benson explores the relationship of Wilde’s classic The Portrait of Dorian Gray to morality. In the preface to this book Oscar Wilde provocatively claimed,
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or […]