Many readers love Roger Scruton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton) for his traditionalist conservatism whether that be in aesthetics, politics, The Church of England, or public affairs (e.g. issues like fox hunting). Making love to Roger might be a whole lot trickier. He has allowed the fecundity of his mind to generate a tome on the philosophical aspects of […]
Sexual Desire by Roger Scruton Read More »
We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a ‘collective afterlife’ in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler (http://as.nyu.edu/faculty/samuel-scheffler.html) maintains
Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler Read More »
Our subjective experience of time is that the future advances towards us into the present moment and then recedes into the past. It is a kind of ‘flow’, ‘the river of time’. Many thinkers are troubled, though, by questions about the relation between past, present and future. Is time travel possible? If so could you
Real Time II by David Mellor Read More »
This is the best short introduction to Humanism I’ve read. Part of the ‘Thinking in Action’ series from Routledge, it is systematic, clear and cool headed. People often ask me ‘What is Humanism?’ The short answer is ‘An ethical life without superstition’ Richard Norman (Professor of Philosophy at Kent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Norman) covers all the main points
On Humanism by Richard Norman Read More »
Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protagoras) declares in the dialogue of the same name by Plato that ‘Man is the Measure of all Things’. If there is an objective reality ‘out there’ how can we know it except through our human point of view? David E. Cooper, (Professor of Philosophy at Durham, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Cooper) takes up this challenge.
The Measure of Things by David E. Cooper Read More »
MANY people have argued that humans are naturally cooperative. Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, the Dalai Lama, Russian zoologist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin, neurobiologist James Rilling and psychologist Dacher Keltner, among many others have all made the case that our animal nature is characterised as much by kindness and collaboration as it is by
The Age of Empathy Read More »
Physics and Cosmology are moving forward with unprecedented speed. It’s therefore difficult to recommend any one volume which can summarize our latest understanding of the Universe. This is as good as any, published in 2007. Gribbin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gribbin) attempts the complete sweep of the Universe from its beginning at the Big Bang to its possible ends,
The Universe: A Biography Read More »
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 »
