Donald E. Brown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_E._Brown) offered this thesis in 1991. His own summary of human universals is that they “comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception.” We are all tiresomely familiar with the banal falsity that ‘everything is relative’. In the field of anthropology at least, Brown […]
Human Universals by David E. Brown Read More »
In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques declares: “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players.” This is a celebrated use of metaphor, a figure of speech in which one thing is used to describe another. As one of the central structural elements in human thought it is the habit,
Metaphors We Live By- by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Read More »
This volume allows Bryan Magee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Magee) the length to set out the arguments of the great German pessimist. He is largely sympathetic to Schopenhauer. Firstly he takes over 100 pages to explain how Schopenhauer’s starting point is very much the ‘transcendental idealism’ of Immanuel Kant. Briefly put this is a stance that Kant arrived at
The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee Read More »
Jonathan Dollimore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Dollimore) tackles a huge theme here. It is the tangled topics of death, desire and loss in Western culture. His aim is to investigate the central paradox that desire is the bedfellow, so to speak, of loss and death. As he puts it ‘what connects death with desire is mutability–the sense that all being
Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture by Jonathan Dollimore Read More »
We are all familiar with John 18:38 where Pontius Pilate asks Jesus ‘What is Truth’. That particular question is as old as philosophy itself. What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No modern philosopher is better suited to answer
Truth and Truthfulness by Bernard Williams Read More »
The ideas of deep thinkers in religion are often at great variance from those of the average congregational member. Here, John Macquarrie (d.2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Macquarrie and http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/world/europe/03macquarrie.html?_r=0), Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, gives us a superb account of exactly those theories which have been at the frontiers of religious thought in the twentieth century. You
Twentieth Century Religious Thought by John Macquarrie Read More »
Alfred North Whitehead (Whitehead, Alfred North | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) was one of the most brilliant minds of his age. In Adventures of Ideas (1933) he offers the most accessible statement of his conception of ‘process philosophy’ (Process Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)). In a nutshell this approach challenges over 2000 years of philosophical assumption.
Adventures of Ideas by Alfred North Whitehead Read More »
A noted author of several books as well as articles in such publications as The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsday, and Vogue, Susan Jacoby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Jacoby) attempts to set the record straight by demonstrating just what sort of role both individual freethinkers as well as more general movements and groups have had on significant
Freethinkers by Susan Jacoby Read More »
Andy Clark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark), Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh argues for the position of the Extended Mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Mind and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/). In its crudest form the contention here is that our minds are not something confined to what’s going on inside our skulls. As Clark says.. “certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback,
Supersizing the Mind by Andy Clark Read More »
