Cognitive Daily (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Greta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, "where fun goes to die." To say that Chicago didn't emphasize academics over a social life is to deny that people literally lived in the library (a full-scale campsite was found behind one of the stairwells in the stacks; students had been living there for months). It's...
Habermasian Reflections (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
Habermas’s Later Pragmatist Turn By Ali Rizvi Robert Brandom describes pragmatism “as a movement centered on the primacy of the practical.” This primacy of practice over theory is manifested in Habermas’s writings in two ways. First, it emerges in his lifelong insistence on the primacy of “know how” (what he often calls intuitive knowledge) over “know that.”...
Perverse Egalitarianism (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
During the morning life agenda setting meeting, Shahar mentioned this book to me and an accompanying review by Allen Wood: Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy, Harvard UP, 2009, 399pp., $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780674035065. Reviewed by Allen Wood, Stanford University One sunny spring day nearly forty years ago, I was sitting in an open [...]
Rome of the West (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
I MUST ADMIT that I find it hard not to plagiarize Dr. Peter Kreeft . But I don't feel so bad, because Dr. Kreeft said (in one of his audio lectures) that he has a difficult time not plagiarizing C. S. Lewis. Fallible Blogma has a project called Support a Catholic Speaker Month , which hopes to introduce to a larger audience the 100 most popular Catholic speakers in the English language. I chose to...
Sacramento Bee (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
Michael Gerson is distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group. There have been various attempts over the decades to bury moral philosophy – to dismiss convictions about right and wrong as cultural prejudices, or secretions of the brain, or matters so personal they shouldn't even affect our private lives. But moral questions always return, as puzzles and as tragedies. Would we push a hefty...
Leiter Reports: A Group Blog (Free subscription) | 10/27/2009
Not sure when these were announced, but one philosopher was among the winners: Anne Margaret Baxley (Wash U/St. Louis) for a project on Kant's ethics.
Just In Just Out (Free subscription) | 10/26/2009
Technological Cooperation in Dairy and Food Processing to drive the Indo-French Collaboration: Idrac The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) organised an Interactive session with Ms Anne- Marie Idrac, Minister for Foreign Trade , France and Business Meetings between French Delegation members and Indian Industry on 26 October 2009. The session was honored with the presence of Mr. Subodh Kant Sahai,...
Campaign for the American Reader (Free subscription) | 10/25/2009
Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy by Arthur Ripstein.About the book, from the publisher:In this masterful work, both an illumination of Kant’s thought and an important contribution to contemporary legal and political theory, Arthur Ripstein gives a comprehensive yet accessible account of Kant’s political philosophy. Ripstein shows...
frog design™ (Free subscription) | 10/20/2009
My mom always told me “Make your passion your profession, and you’ll be a happy man.” She was right, and I am glad I followed her advice. Yet I appear to be part of a minority. In an article about growing disenchantment at work (“Hating What You Do”) , this week’s Economist cites a survey conducted by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy. It...
frog design™ (Free subscription) | 10/20/2009
My mom always told me “Make your passion your profession, and you’ll be a happy man.” She was right, and I am glad I followed her advice. Yet I appear to be part of a minority. In an article about growing disenchantment at work (“Hating What You Do”) , this week’s Economist cites a survey conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy. It...
Europe 1700-1914 (Free subscription) | 10/18/2009
Although the Enlightenment is most commonly associated with Frenchmen like Voltaire and the other philosophes , and with Hume and the Scottish thinkers who followed him, the most famous description of the Enlightement came from the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant , who in 1784 wrote a celebrated essay, 'What is Enlightenment?' Here's a sample: 'Enlightenment ( Aufkl ärung ) is man's emergence...
Leiter Reports: A Group Blog (Free subscription) | 10/14/2009
Regan Penaluna (St. John's University) offers the following explanation (this is subscription access only to read the whole thing): Ask a student to name philosophers from history, and she will probably rattle off Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, and Kant. The...
Apologetics 315 (Free subscription) | 10/13/2009
Transcendence : That which is higher than or surpasses other things. What is transcendent is thus relative to what is transcended. God is conceived by traditional theologians as being transcendent with respect to the created universe, meaning that he is outside the universe and that no part of the universe is identical to him or part of him. To think of God as transcendent with respect to time is to...
Lectures, (Free subscription) | 10/13/2009
Is Kant's moral theory defensible? Kant's moral theory is an interesting theory which has merits and shortcomings. The philosophy of the categorical imperative has some good ideas however, when taken to an extreme end, it proves to be an irrational and dangerous philosophy. The first formulation expresses Kant's categorical imperative quite well: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can...
Veronica Frydel - Journalism - Photojournalism (Free subscription) | 10/08/2009
Philosophies from the lecture 1 HCJ III Descartes, one of the first significant philosophers gives first thoughts of existentialism saying “I think and therefore I am” showing an idea of a need for having reasons to prove existence. Both, Plato as a poet type of guide for religious and political matters and Aristotle, a political scientist, see justice as a right order of relations. Plato...
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