Posts Tagged philosophy of religion
Colbert vs. O’Reilly on the Argument from Design: Best Comic Use of St. Thomas Aquinas Award
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on February 4, 2011
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Crisis in Egypt – Anderson Cooper & Bill O’Reilly<a> | ||||
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Here’s another brilliant take-down by Colbert of Bill O’Reilly’s argument from design (2 and a half minutes in): “Thank you Bill. You’re like St. Thomas Aquinas. … In that your understanding of the world is also from the thirteenth century.” A feel a little stung on Aquinas’ behalf by the association with O’Reilly and his half-baked theology.
– Wes Alwan
Massimo Pigliucci on In-Your-Face Atheism
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on January 11, 2011
Pigliucci strongly rebukes the organization of which he is a lifetime honorary member, for an ad calling all religions “scams”:
First, the ad is simply making a preposterous claim that cannot possibly be backed up by factual evidence, which means that, technically, it is lying. Not a good virtue for self-righteous critical thinkers…
Yet, several atheists I have encountered have no problem endorsing all sorts of woo-woo stuff, from quasi-new age creeds to “alternative” medicine, to fantapolitics. This is partly because many of them seem to be ignorant of the epistemic limits of science (in which they have almost unbounded faith) and reason (ditto). At the very least it seems that we ought to treat factual evidence with due respect, and claiming that religions are scams flies in the face of the available factual evidence. Hence, it is a bad idea that damages our reputation as an evidence-oriented community.
Summarizing Schopenhauer in Under 600 Seconds
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on January 8, 2011
Here’s another documentary video clip on Schopenhauer, discussing his early disaffection from Christianity, and also some fun facts. For example, he always kept two statues in his study — one of Kant, and the other of Buddha.
Watch in YouTube.
This clip also paraphrases some amusing quotes from Volume II of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, highlighting Artie’s snarky wit, which echoes that of another thinker discussed in earlier podcasts: Read the rest of this entry »
The Sickness Unto Death, the PowerPoint!
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on December 2, 2010
I mentioned on the Kierkegaard episode having prepared a PowerPoint on The Sickness Unto Death, so I submit to you, the morbidly curious, TSUD: The PowerPoint! (Warning, it’s over 700KB, and might take a while to download on slower connections.)
I believe Seth made some minor corrections and improvements, but any errors in spelling, interpretation, or insight are mine. Feel free to use, read, mock, or submit for a high school class project as you deem fit.
-Daniel Horne
Kierkegaard, Docudramatized
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch, Web Detritus on November 30, 2010
Kierkegaard’s stern Christian vision originated with a strict, almost traumatic, upbringing. His defense of individualism and radical subjectivity would not likely have developed without it. But it’s hard for the modern reader to get past Kierkegaard’s freakish, introverted persona. A more sympathetic view of K. might be found in the 1984 BBC television series Sea of Faith, written and presented by controversial ex-Anglican-priest-and-Cambridge-dean-turned-radical-theologian Don Cupitt:
Watch on youtube.
In response to more cynical assessments of K., Cupitt provides this rejoinder in the book version of The Sea of Faith:
Yet to end on such a note could be to suggest that Kierkegaard was a side-show freak: we wonder at him, and then return to our humdrum lives. Not so. Kierkegaard, more than any other writer of recent centuries, has the power to make us believe that we might actually succeed in becoming something of worth… Read the rest of this entry »
Kierkegaard and Cinema
Posted by Daniel Horne in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on November 24, 2010
You don’t have to be a self-absorbed mope to like Kierkegaard, but it can’t hurt. Below is a stereotypically morose clip from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), which echoes themes presented in The Sickness Unto Death:
The protagonist, Antonius Block, is a medieval knight suffering from what Kierkegaard might classify as conscious despair of infinitude. Despite assertions by many a cinema studies major, it’s not obvious whether Bergman was directly influenced by Kierkegaard, or whether Bergman simply shared Kierkegaard’s Lutheran outlook. Both Kierkegaard and Bergman were raised by authoritarian, pietistic fathers. (Bergman’s dad was a Lutheran minister.) Bergman never admitted to the Kierkegaardian influence often ascribed to him, or even to ever having read Kierkegaard. On the other hand, Bergman had read Sartre, Camus, and the Finnish positivist philosopher Eino Kaila. And it seems unlikely that a 20th century Scandinavian intellectual with a Lutheran upbringing, who was versed enough in philosophy to read Sartre and Kaila, would not have had at least a passing familiarity with Kierkegaard.
What is Despair, Anyway?
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on November 23, 2010
[Editor’s note: If you’ve listened to the Kierkegaard episode, then you’ve heard plenty of felicitous exposition and argumentation by Mr. Daniel Horne, whom we’ve consequently invited to post some follow-up thoughts and resources over the next weeks:
Yes, we know Kierkegaard thought of despair as sin, but is despair “a” sin? Is it “sin” writ large? Despair is prohibited by no Biblical commandment, so what was Kierkegaard getting at? In The Book of Dead Philosophers,
Kierkegaard scholar Gordon Marino gave a similarly opaque description of despair with his unsatisfying New York Times op-ed. Marino correctly describes several different aspects of despair presented by The Sickness Unto Death. But not only did Marino avoid summarizing Kierkegaard’s concept of despair, he ignored Kierkegaard’s proffered cure, which would have gone a long way toward explaining the sickness. The resulting confusion to NYT readers was clear in the comments following his editorial. In response, Marino conceded that Kierkegaard’s proposition was fundamentally religious, and not merely psychological. Marino also belatedly provided a useful insight: Despair is best classified as one of the seven deadly sins, that of acedia, a kind of spiritual sloth.
Episode 29: Kierkegaard on the Self
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on November 21, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:56:32 — 106.8MB)
Discussing Soren Kierkegaard’s “The Sickness Unto Death” (1849).
What is the self? For K. we are a tension between opposites: necessity and possibility, the finite and the infinite, soul and body. He thinks we’re all in despair, whether we know it or not, because we wrongly think we’re something we’re not, or we reject what we are, or we just don’t pay attention to this dynamic at all: we just go along with the crowd. So we need to keep self-examining and (he thinks) ultimately embrace our subservience to God.
Joined by guest podcaster/Kiekegaard’s lawyer Daniel Horne, we consider K.’s 3-step self-help program and whether there’s anything to be gotten here if you don’t subscribe to K’s Christianity.
Read the text free online or buy the book.
End song: “John T. Flibber,” from Happy Songs Will Bring You Down by the MayTricks (1994).
B.S. about Jesus and Buddhism
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on October 28, 2010
Could Jesus have been taken to India as a child and taught Buddhism? Hmmm? Hmmm? Here’s something that apparently showed on the BBC at some point:
OK, some silly speculation here (and more amusingly told in Christoper Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal),
Read the rest of this entry »
Who’s Qualified to Speak about Religion?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on October 13, 2010
The most recent comment to yesterday’s post on atheism was a quote (thanks, Jonathan!) from Jose Ortega y Gasset used on this blog to argue that scientists shouldn’t be weighing in on matters of religion and ethics which are, after all, not their specialty.
The point is well taken, reflecting Socrates’s general criticism that every expert in one area thinks he’s an expert in everything. However, Ortega y Gasset’s critique is equally applicable to anyone who has not engaged in the requisite level of philosophical reflection, including any religious believers who have not studied epistemology and clergy who have not thought a lot about meta-ethics.
How much is “a lot” or “requisite?” I don’t know. Dawkins’s book is, unsurprisingly, at its strongest when talking about natural selection; his comments about ethics and other matters are certainly researched (much like Freud’s comments on anthropology and other subjects that make up his speculative work), but Dawkins is obviously not deeply familiar with the vast canon of philosophy in these areas.
Read the rest of this entry »
Freud on Religion: A Quiz
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on October 3, 2010
Given that the subject of our Freud episode was Civilization and its Discontents, we were pretty quick regarding Freud’s specific points on religion, which are pretty interesting in themselves, in that his view is for practical purposes very much in line with the modern scientism of someone like Dawkins but acknowledges elements of Kantian agnosticism. For a refresher, here’s a short quiz I found on the web that puts forth the basic points in a painless manner.
Why would you want to answer quiz questions instead of just reading a two paragraph summary, that I could write right here? Well, because it’s like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, and who doesn’t like those? (Do you young people under 30 even remember those?) Just like when reading one of those books, I suggest you click on all the wrong answers first, as the author Harry Gensler, philosophy prof. at John Caroll University in Cleveland) here gives a few interesting remarks like “that’s not Freud’s view but it is the view of this guy and this other guy.”
If you like this, Gensler has a number of other quizzes and study aids on ethics, philosophy of religion, and several of the figures we have covered or will cover in the podcast.
To learn more about Freud’s view here, take a gander at his book The Future of an Illusion (Buy it here).
-Mark Linsenmayer
Karen Amstrong, Ross Douthat, and the Functions of Religion
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on September 24, 2010
My post on fake myths has generated some good discussion, and our future podcast guest Daniel Horne pointed me to a nice concise New York Times review by Ross Douthat of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, which prompted my line of thought about myth.
Douthat’s review presents a much better summary to the book than my preliminary attempt, and makes the overall point, which I agree with, that her argument ultimately doesn’t save the what the average Joe considers religion to be.
In short, she thinks what’s valuable about religion is its fulfillment of a spiritual need, and that fulfilling this need doesn’t require making specific metaphysical assertions. So, we should read scriptures allegorically and should be pluralist and open-minded about the many historical attempts to reach the divine, which is essentially inexpressible though not on that account entirely unknowable.
Read the rest of this entry »
Hawking Keeps Hacking: “Philosophy is Dead”
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on September 7, 2010
Apparently Stephen Hawking not only thinks that spontaneous creation from nothingness is somehow a scientific concept: he also claims that “philosophy is dead” (and as I point out, this is hardly surprising given the core anti-intellectualism lurking behind his amateur philosophizing).
Here’s a reaction from Burke’s Corner:
In his failure to exercise modesty in his pursuit of scientific knowledge, Hawking makes a particularly startling claim – that “philosophy is dead“. From Plato and Aristotle to Maimonides and Aquinas to Kant and Hegel, Hawking dismisses how the human mind across cultures and millenia has reflected on transcendence and humanity’s place in a vast universe. Hawking’s lack of humility before this endeavour is staggering. In her Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson rightly states that this approach to science excludes “the whole enterprise of metaphysical thought,” despite metaphysical reflection being a defining characteristic of the human experience.
A Philosopher of Religion No Longer
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on September 7, 2010
Over the past ten years I have published, in one venue or another, about twenty things on the philosophy of religion. I have a book on the subject, God and Burden of Proof, and another criticizing Christian apologetics, Why I am not a Christian. During my academic career I have debated William Lane Craig twice and creationists twice. I have written one master’s thesis and one doctoral dissertation in the philosophy of religion, and I have taught courses on the subject numerous times. But no more. I’ve had it. I’m going back to my real interests in the history and philosophy of science and, after finishing a few current commitments, I’m writing nothing more on the subject. I could give lots of reasons. For one thing, I think a number of philosophers have made the case for atheism and naturalism about as well as it can be made…..
Stephen Hawking: “Nothing” has more explanatory value than “God”
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on September 7, 2010
Stephen Hawking makes perhaps one of the dumbest forays by a scientist into philosophy that I have ever seen:
That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
Well that settles it. Something spontaneously arose out of nothing. No need for an explanation of that. Move on people, nothing mysterious here, stop asking questions. The blue touch paper lit itself, and there is something called “nothingness” which contains that blue torch paper as well as laws governing it. Perhaps this is all, in some Deepak Chopra sense, true. But it is not “the answer of modern science.” It is purely speculative, and whether we want to use the word “God” to describe the mystery of spontaneous generation or leave it at a nothing containing the seed of spontaneous generation seems to be a semantic distinction, with the latter in no way naturalizing or demystifying the former.
Episode 24: Spinoza on God and Metaphysics
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on August 24, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:36:01 — 88.0MB)
Discussing Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), books 1 and 2.
We mostly discuss his weird, immanent, non-personal conception of God: God is everything, therefore the world is God as apprehended through some particular attributes, namely insofar as one of his aspects is infinite space (extension, i.e. matter) and insofar as one of his aspects is mind (our minds being chunks or “modes” of the big God mind).
Also, if you’re not going to sell out and go for a university position in philosophy, should you instead grind lenses in your attic without adequate ventilation? (Hint: no) Plus, the Amsterdam of yesterday, whose heady aroma drove people to write like Euclid, property dualism rears its ugly head, and Mel Gibson as Rousseau!
Read a free version online or purchase the book.
One place to read the earlier Spinoza book I refer to, A Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being (1660), is here. The Karen Armstrong book I keep referring to is The Case for God,
The dumbed down, non-geometric presentation of the Ethics that I talk about is here.
End song: “Spiritual Insect,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).
A New Atheist on the “Ground Zero Mosque”
Posted by Wes Alwan in Misc. Philosophical Musings on August 18, 2010
Sam Harris makes it clear that his atheism is in fact motivated less by reason and more by spleen:
Should a 15-story mosque and Islamic cultural center be built two blocks from the site of the worst jihadist atrocity in living memory? Put this way, the question nearly answers itself.
He compares it to building a shrine to Satan or a 9/11 truther institute. And: “At this point in human history, Islam simply is different from other faiths.” Namely:
And honest reasoning declares that there is much that is objectionable—and, frankly, terrifying—about the religion of Islam and about the state of discourse among Muslims living in the West, and it is decidedly inconvenient that discussing these facts publicly is considered a sign of “intolerance” by well-intentioned liberals, in part because such criticism resonates with the actual bigotry of not-so-well-intentioned conservatives.
To prove this, who quotes the Koran and notes that he doesn’t hear “from Western Muslims … any frank acknowledgment of these unpleasant truths.”
But of course, the Old Testament is equally terrifying, and Christians and Jews aren’t in a habit of putting out press releases frankly acknowledging all its unpleasant truths. And one’s being unaware of something doesn’t mean that it’s not happening: an empirical investigation would be required to see what kinds of conversations are going on in communities all over the world. It’s not something Harris, in this case, seems to care about — but of course it’s not something he could do thoroughly enough in principle to allay his suspicions. That’s why intelligent people refrain from generalizing in such situations.
"I’ve never before heard my work discussed like that, and rarely as intelligently ... I listened to the whole podcast, and felt exalted afterward." -- Arthur Danto
The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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