PHILOSOPHY – The love of wisdom

Today, 31 March 2018, is the day of Stephen Hawking’s funeral. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-43582950). It says something about our culture and its deep religious heritage that the funeral should take place in Great St. Mary’s Church, Cambridge. It is conducted by churchmen of the Anglican fold. This in full acknowledgement of Hawking’s atheism (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/03/14/im-not-afraid-what-stephen-hawking-said-about-god-his-atheism-and-his-own-death/?utm_term=.1945c64ab9d0) Hawking’s ashes are […]

Many people now find the old creeds unconvincing, and are increasingly turning to naturalistic explanations of their world. At significant moments in their lives, such as weddings and funeral services, many opt for a humanist ceremony (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/increasingly-popular-humanist-weddings-to-overtake-church-of-scotland-ceremonies-within-two-years-8581924.html). What, then, of the intellectual underpinnings of this shift in understanding? James Thrower’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Thrower) concise account of atheism

In the Philosophical Investigations (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#PhilInve), Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that philosophical perplexities “arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.” When we are engaged in everyday practicalities and challenges there seems no point in metaphysics. If that suffices, turn the page. If you have fallen prey to some of these speculations it’s

The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism presents an edited collection of essays that explore the nature of humanism (https://humanism.org.uk/humanism/) as an approach to life, and a philosophical analysis of the key humanist propositions from naturalism and science to morality and meaning. It looks at humanism not just in terms of its theoretical underpinnings, but also

Flim-Flam! explains that not one shard of evidence exists to prove that the Bermuda Triangle poses any special menace to ships and planes, that earth is being visited by alien spacecraft, that the unassisted power of mind can read closed books, predict our future or induce levitation. It shows that the ‘psychic surgeons’ of the Philippines have relieved their

Anyone gripped by the thorny problems in philosophy of language will welcome this volume. The anthology of essays on the work of David Kaplan, a leading contemporary philosopher of language, sprang from a conference, ‘Themes from Kaplan’,  organized by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. The book contains sixteen papers

I’d better declare – Isaiah Berlin (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/) is right up there for me as a penetrating intellect and champion of liberalism. The Proper Study of Mankind brings together his most celebrated writing. In this volume the reader will find Berlin’s famous essay on Tolstoy, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’; his insightful portraits of contemporaries from Pasternak and

Modern science proceeds on the basis that we live in a material world, and its methods of investigation have been spectacularly successful on this basis. It’s somewhat embarrassing, then, that the interior world of consciousness has so far eluded the categories of natural science. This is the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness, summarised here https://www.iep.utm.edu/hard-con/.

Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh argue that ancient Chinese wisdom has relevance for us today. They give us three chapters of Confucian thinkers and three chapters on the Taoist tradition. In each case, the authors explain how these ideas challenge our modern Western assumptions in ways that could have an impact on our everyday decisions.