At Sunday School in The Channel Isles about 150 years ago I was taught to sing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful‘ the opening verse of which is: ‘All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all’. Mrs Phillips, our teacher, didn’t mention the […]
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard Read More »
Philosophical scepticism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_skepticism) comes in a variety of flavours and strengths and is strongly represented in the classical period. It is time well spent to pick out the various strands. The best recent rebuttal I’ve read is from the pen of public intellectual and prolific author Anthony (‘A.C.’) Grayling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._C._Grayling) in a 1985 publication ‘The Refutation of Scepticism‘. Put
The Refutation of Scepticism by A.C. Grayling Read More »
This book is a one volume introduction to Western intellectual history. Richard Tarnas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tarnas) takes us on a journey from the Greeks to postmodernism. The contemporary world of postmodern thought, according to Tarnas, is caught “between the inner craving for a life of meaning and the relentless attrition of existence in a cosmos that our rational
The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas Read More »
An ocean liner cannot turn round on a sixpence. Neither can human nature spin itself away from hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Humans are a bundle of pleistocene instincts dressed by Marks & Spencer with some clever gadgetry to hand. Robert Winston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Winston) expertly dissects the deep human motivations that are really in
Human Instinct by Robert Winston Read More »
The mind-body problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-body_dichotomy) is as old as philosophy itself. Modern science proceeds with the assumption that the category of subject matter under investigation is physical. How can this accommodate consciouness and mental causation, though? These seem not to be reducible. Qualia (the ‘felt experience’ of the conscious mind, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) seem particularly resistent. Jaegwon Kim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaegwon_Kim) offers a fresh
Physicalism by Jaegwon Kim Read More »
Man, Beast and Zombie (2000) by Kenan Malik (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenan_Malik) investigates the historical roots, philosophical assumptions and alleged methodological problems of contemporary theories of human nature, in particular evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. Malik argues that, ‘The triumph of mechanistic explanations of human nature is as much the consequence of our culture’s loss of nerve as
Man, Beast and Zombie by Kenan Malik Read More »
