philosophy
Getting to the Good Place
Can moral philosophy get Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani to the Good Place, or do we need to talk, first, about salvation?
What Do You Believe? How Do You Know? Want a Free Book?
For as long as I’ve been interested in the search for proofs about the existence of God, I’ve been interested in drawing them. Words and equations just didn’t seem like enough; to wrap my head around what these constructs were expressing, and to try to communicate them to others, I had to make pictures. As…
When Pessimism Tramples Truth
Roger Scruton’s New York Times column “When Hope Tramples Truth” extols the virtues of pessimism by decrying the mindlessness of those endorsing marriage equality. But it turns out that being a pessimist does not preclude one from being a bigot; Scruton’s column shows how to be both at once. Scruton sets out to convince us…
Blogging the Jameses
Reading the correspondence of Henry and William James, it’s surprising to see just how much of William’s will-to-believe doctrine and his ideas of the religiously “sick souled” appear, in nascent form, in letters to his brother. What’s even more surprising is measuring, in Henry’s replies, just how much of his brother’s thought crept into his…
How to Instigate a God Debate
Last week I had the chance to catch what was probably the biggest God debate of the year, in this genre of blockbuster, YouTubed, college-campus bouts. The topic was “Is Good from God?”—is religion necessary for objective morality? The debaters were William Lane Craig, the evangelical philosopher, and Sam Harris, who launched the New Atheism…
Revolution Is What You Do
It’s a happy day when good ideas—and the people who create them—get their due. Today was one of those days. Thanks in large part to The New York Times‘s feature on the backdrop of the revolution in Egypt, and then a profile devoted to him (which as I write is still #1 on the most-emailed…
Do Not Strive for the Life of the Immortals
The philosopher Patrick Lee Miller has an intriguing new book out—Becoming God—which I’ve been privileged to follow from the dissertation stage some time ago. It’s a daring philosophical argument wrapped up in a close reading of ancient texts. In the pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus, he finds an alternative to the most cherished axiom of philosophy, from…
Hear Robby George Call Cornel West “My Brother”
On a new Bloggingheads.tv diavlog, Princeton professors Robert P. George (leading Catholic conservative and sex advisor) and Cornel West (supreme lover and taxicab philosopher) find amazing amounts of agreement on questions of human dignity, from the commodification of society to abortion. They’re both even wearing black three-piece suits. Do the left and right disagree about…
Two Big New God Debates
You may not be as big a fan of debates about the existence of God as I am (I’m writing a whole book about them), but maybe you care enough to appreciate that there was big news in that department this past week. First: Dawkins-Craig. William Lane Craig, if you don’t know him, is the…
The Protests of Zizek and the Spirit of Communism
Last Tuesday night, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek waged a fight on two fronts, against both God and capitalism. The theater of battle was the New York Public Library’s basement auditorium, a grand room whose marble and polished wood glowed under tastefully dim lighting. Zizek dressed for the occasion in a brown t-shirt and blue…
The God of This World
Isn’t it obvious that God, or at least our idea of God, needs saving as much as we do? He—forgive me if necessary for saying “He”—has been run through the mud by terrorists, televangelists, New Atheists, and grandmothers’ guilt. The rest of us are supposed to have a relationship with this guy? Or even just…
Truth-ing Mythology
There’s this passage toward the end of the all-important book XII of Aristotle’s Metaphysics that I keep coming back to, one of those bits that reaches out of its antiquity and walks among us. Book XII is where Aristotle’s account of the world beyond physics reaches up from the chains of causes acting on causes…
Divine Simplity and OkCupid Complexity
If I’ve gotten my zero dollars’ worth from my OkCupid membership, it’s for the data more than the dates. (My scientist uncle suggests that five dates would be an adequate sample. I’ve been on two and am having trouble bringing myself to try a third.) The site seems aware of this bit of consolation; their…
Martyr City
If you don’t know the name Hypatia, you should. In the grand mythology of the Enlightenment (to which, on optimistic days, I subscribe), her murder at the hands of a Christian mob marks more or less the end of Greek philosophy and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Now, for those of you who don’t…