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 that he burns in hell? Related: The first in the series, “Topic of Cancer,” by Christopher Hitchens.

This promises to be quite a ride…

–seth

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 twelfth-thirteenth century Sufi mystic, as saying:

Do not praise your own faith exclusively so that you disbelieve all the rest. If you do this you will miss much good. Nay, you will miss the whole truth of the matter. God, the omniscient and the omnipresent, cannot be confined to any one creed, for he says in the Koran, wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah. Everybody praises what he knows. His God is his own creature, and in praising it, he praises himself. Which he would not do if he were just, for his dislike is based on ignorance.

By: Wes Alwan

At the New York Times’ Room for Debate some philosopher 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 from science and other disciplines (really, every and any discipline) is nothing new. Ernest Sosa points out that experimental philosophers go one step farther, becoming scientists rather than merely making use of science — “a welcome development”; yet “attacks on the traditional methodology based on experimental results have been unconvincing.”  That traditional method is dialectic.

I’m inclined to agree with Timothy Williamson, who notes that there are:

philosophy-hating philosophers who would like to replace the traditional methodology of philosophy, with their stress on a combination of abstract reasoning and particular examples, by something more like imitation psychology. Without even properly defining what it is they are attacking, they use experimental results in a selective and unscientific spirit to try to discredit the traditional methodology.

In other cases experimentalists draw lessons for morality from the results of brain scans in comically naive ways, without realizing how many philosophical assumptions they are uncritically relying on in their inferences — precisely because they neglect traditional philosophical skills in making distinctions and assessing arguments. The danger is that the publicity such crude work attracts will give a bad name to constructive developments in which experimental results really do cast light on philosophical questions.

Philosophy has most to contribute to the pursuit of truth by refining its own distinctive methods, not by imitating other disciplines. Philosophers are not needed as amateur experimentalists or writers of pop science.

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”, Philosophical Perspectives 23:1, 79-110

By: Wes Alwan

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 superficially resembles that of an out-of-control toddler, and in truth posits her as more of a latter-day Dagny Taggart than any kind of enfant terrible.

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.

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 comment-ers also seem to think the book is worthy of a lot of heated discussion).

Here’s the exchange between second graders as quoted in The New York Times:

“It’s only a tree,” Justin said with a shrug.

“The tree has feelings!” Keyshawn replied.

Some reasoned that even if the tree wanted the boy to have its apples and branches, there might be unforeseen consequences.

“If they take the tree’s trunk, um, the tree’s not going to live,” said Nyasia.

Isaiah was among only a few pupils who said they would treat an inanimate object differently from a human friend.

“Say me and a rock was a friend,” he said. “It would be different, because a rock can’t move. And it can’t look around.”

This gave his classmates pause.

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