Apostrophe Abuse I have affirmative proof of the imminent collapse of civilization. In Britain there was something called “The Apostrophe Protection Society.” They just announced: “We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won.” In case you think I make this stuff […]
Read more...Author: Albert
Overton Window
The Mind Friday’s (11/22/10) Wall Street Journal article by Robert Lee Holtz: Music’s Universal Pull Studied by Algorithm. Turns out there are some “universal patterns” in music, even correcting for biases of culture, perception, and the findings appearing in Western scholarship. Music apparently has “bedeviled” Darwinian biologists. Luke Glowacki of Pennsylvania State University […]
Read more...Beauty and Art
A few years ago I commented on a book by philosopher Edward Feser titled The Last Superstition. Feser laid out the reasoning of ancient philosophers, emphasizing Aristotle, showing how the existence of physical things pointed unmistakeably to a non-physical reality behind it. Feser’s book ended with a saying attributed to Confuscious: when the finger points […]
Read more...Anxious Reason
I stumbled on an excellent article nominally about Daniel Dafoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe but really about the Enlightenment debates about the supernatural; how we reconcile the two ways of knowing. Crusoe at the Crossroads/On Robinson Crusoe, Lost, and why we keep returning to mysterious islands where science blurs with the supernatural. It’s at […]
Read more...The Judge
Here are a few themes of Blood Meridian, subtitled The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy. The character Holden, called “the judge” is Mephistophelean, and at the end is revealed as the devil himself. His chief attribute is that he is the accuser, as with the preacher at the beginning, the expriest Tobin […]
Read more...Uploaded Mind?
What do you think of this? In an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago, Princeton Neuroscience professor Michael S.A. Graziano asserts “the day is coming when we will be able to scan our entire consciousness into a computer . . . .” The title of the piece asks rhetorically “will […]
Read more...More Than Machines
I recommend The New Story of Science by Robert Augros and George Stanciu. It was first published in 1984, and that makes it prescient, given the more recent debates between theism and atheism. The central premise is that there is an Old Story of science, and a New Story. The Old Story is tied […]
Read more...Power Struggle
I sit up and pay attention when Roger Scruton speaks. He recently considered the significance of the worldview evinced in books by Uval Noah Harari, who is a biological determinist in the same vein as Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Harari acknowledges the philosophical consequences of the humanist rejection of transcendent truth. He goes a step […]
Read more...The Dismal Tide
“Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I don’t want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work.” This line is spoken in the early scenes of No Country for Old Men, a Coen Brothers movie that’s been out for 10-plus years now. I saw […]
Read more...The Back Row
I read a bunch of reviews of Chris Arnade’s recent book Dignity before picking it up myself and they often remark upon the objective and nonjudgmental approach Arnade takes. He’s purposely encountering people we might think of as down and out, to try to understand them. One of his conclusions is that a major […]
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