PHILOSOPHY – The love of wisdom – Page 7

God’s Funeral by A.N. Wilson

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, PHILOSOPHY - The love of wisdom, SPIRIT MATTERS - Reaching for the Divine

Andrew (‘A.N.’) Wilson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wilson_(writer and http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/18/magazine/the-busy-busy-wasp.html) offered us, in 1999, this study in the decline of religious certainty. The book focuses on artists and intellectuals and covers Gibbon, Hume, Kant, Marx, Garibaldi, Bentham, George Eliot, Lenin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Shaw, Hardy, Hegel and Freud among others. Very good on the devastating sense of emotional loss […]

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The Refutation of Scepticism by A.C. Grayling

PHILOSOPHY - The love of wisdom

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

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The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, PHILOSOPHY - The love of wisdom

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

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Physicalism by Jaegwon Kim

PHILOSOPHY - The love of wisdom

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

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Man, Beast and Zombie by Kenan Malik

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, PHILOSOPHY - The love of wisdom

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

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