John Rawls: On My Religion
How Rawls’s political philosophy was influenced by his religion.
Further reading:
d’Espagnat takes big prize for work on quantum mechanics
Earlier this week, the Templeton Foundation announced the 2009 winner of its $1.42 million Templeton Prize, French physicist and philosopher Bernard d’Espagnat. He is best known for his work to understand and test one of the strangest predictions of the theory of quantum mechanics: that particles are good players of The Newlywed Game. Pairs of them can give exactly the same responses to measurements conducted on them at the same time in isolated booths.
Additional reading:
Reading list
Questioning authority. Nietzsche’s gift to Derrida. “Be it the moral-theological tradition, God, or his own status as author, Nietzsche’s refusal to legitimate authority remains constant. As Alan D. Schrift writes, Nietzsche’s deconstruction of authoritarian subjectivity shares much with Jacques Derrida’s post-modern critique of the subject as a privileged centre of discourse.”
Philosophical Knowledge: Its Possibility and Scope. Reviewed by Duncan Pritchard, University of Edinburgh.
Science and religion
Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.
Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute. The media exaggerate their numbers and importance. The media rarely mention the fact that the great majority of religious people belong to moderate denominations that treat science with respect, or the fact that the great majority of scientists treat religion with respect so long as religion does not claim jurisdiction over scientific questions.
–Full article by Freeman Dyson, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and known also for Dyson spheres.
Quote
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered.
Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
Anonymous; quoted in Dennett, Daniel C. (2006). Breaking .the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon;
Who Owns The Moon
The moon has been in plain view for all of human history, but it’s only within the past few decades that it’s been possible to travel there. And for just about as long as the moon has been within reach, people have been arguing about lunar property rights: Can astronauts claim the moon for king and country, as in the Age of Discovery? Are corporations allowed to expropriate its natural resources, and individuals to own its real estate? Glenn Harlan Reynolds at Popular Mechanics.
Property from a philosophical point of view.
The Turing Test
The Turing test (another good article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) is a proposal for a test of a machine’s capability to demonstrate intelligence. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.
I understand that CAPTCHAS (= Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) are reverse Turing tests (because it is administered by a machine and targeted to a human, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is typically administered by a human and targeted to a machine). Before being allowed to do some action on a website, the user is presented with a alphanumerical characters in a distorted graphic image and asked to recognise it. This is intended to prevent automated systems from abusing the site. The assumption is that software sufficiently sophisticated to read the distorted image accurately does not exist (or is not available to the average user), so any system able to do so must be a human being.
Weekend Reading
The Origins of Cybex Space about Gustav Zander’s amazing gymnastic devices
Rawls vs. Nozick: the standoff between these two thinkers is central to political philosophy today. More on Rawls and also more on Nozick.
The Nerve of Frida Kahlo in the NYRB. Links I posted last year about Frida.
No forbidden zone in reading ?
Dushu (simplified Chinese: 读书; pinyin: Dúshū, Reading in Chinese) is a monthly Chinese literary magazine. First published in April 1979 with its leading article No Forbidden Zone in Reading, it has great influence in Chinese intellects.
In the New Left Review of Jan-Feb 2008 Zhang Yongle provides a detailed history of the magazine entitled No Forbidden Zone in Reading. The survey relates the journal’s trajectory to the PRC’s dramatic development course and ruptures within its intelligentsia. A very interesting article that gives a good window on intellectual debates in the PRC since the mid nineties and the discussions going on about the (partial ?) adoptation of the capitalist model in China. See also e.g. wikipedia on the Chinese New Left and the Chines Liberals.
Another overview of the differing voices and views of leading Chinese thinkers, debating the future of their society and its place in the world, can be found in One China, Many Paths, a collection of essays reflecting the new thinking that developed in the 1990s. Both Chinese liberal and Chinese New Left views are represented, along with some views that do not fit either category (review of this book by Ban Wang).
People love hierarchies
When anarchists get together to form an anarchist association, the first thing they do is elect a governing committee… more». Interesting article.
The End of Cosmology?
Cosmology, from the Greek: κοσμολογία (cosmologia, κόσμος (cosmos) order + λογος (logos) word, reason, plan) is the quantitative (usually mathematical) study of the Universe in its totality, and by extension, humanity’s place in it. Though the word cosmology is recent (first used in 1730 in Christian Wolff’s Cosmologia Generalis), study of the Universe has a long history involving science, philosophy, esotericism, and religion.
A decade ago astronomers made the revolutionary discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. They are still working out is implications. The quickening expansion will eventually pull galaxies apart faster than light, causing them to drop out of view. This process eliminates reference points for measuring expansion and dilutes the distinctive products of the big bang to nothingness. In short, it erases all the signs that a big bang ever occurred. To our distant descendants, the universe will look like a small puddle of stars in an endless, changeless void.What knowledge has the universe already erased? (via sciam)
Further reading
Physical cosmology : Cosmic Journey: A History of Scientific Cosmology from the American Institute of Physics
Esoteric cosmology : wikipedia
Religious cosmology: wikipedia
The Morning of the Magicians
Well, why not give this a try for a change ? Le Matin des Magiciens was a book written by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in 1960 or in October 1959. It was first published in English in 1963 with the title The Morning of the Magicians. The book was a general overview of the occult and the works of Charles Fort. It is the best known example of Fantastic Realism (Réalisme fantastique), a literary movement in the 1960s.
On ideas
What does Nietzsche mean to philosophers today? Excessively sensitive, anti-liberal, and irrelevant, or radical, prescient, and misunderstood? Six philosophers answer Kritika&Kontext’s questions on Nietzsche. Their responses make one thing clear: Nietzsche still divides opinion.
Charles Taylor may be the most important philosopher writing in English today. He is drawn to big issues like the evolution of the modern self, and his latest book defends religion from its critics.
What Was I Thinking?
Books review of two books on irrationalism and behavioral economics. The writer describes ordering a book on Amazon and adding money to her order in order to qualify for free shipping. She cost herself an extra $12.91. Why do people do things like this? Actual economic life is full of miscalculations. By Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker.
Some extracts:
Dan Ariely says in his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions: “Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic.” Anchoring seems to be in play, or a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on one trait or piece of information when making decisions. But there is also the Endowment effect, or people place a higher value on objects they own relative to objects they do not, and several other strange behaviour.
The second book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, agrees that faced with certain options, people will consistently make the wrong choice. Therefore, they argue, people should be offered options that work with, rather than against, their unreasoning tendencies. These foolish-proof choices they label “nudges.”
So what to do with this information ? We can try to become more aware of the patterns governing our blunders, as “Predictably Irrational” urges. Or we can try to prod people toward more rational choices, as “Nudge” suggests.
History Shows That Famous Thinkers Also Get It Wrong.
From particle physics to evolutionary theory, to the atomic bomb, to global warming, to the battle of the sexes, to the equality of human beings, to God and the paranormal, and to the dogmatism of scientists themselves, dozens of the big thinkers in the world explained online, at the start of 2008, what the most important things that they’ve change their minds about during their lives are.
The project takes place on the website www.edge.org, a kind of informal think tank, a forum for ideas and scientific debates (see adjoining article), which asks such questions annually online and later publishes the result in book form.
Quote from the Edge:
When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.
The God Issue
Is the Divine dead? In this special issue, the New Statesman weighs up the evidence. Andrew Marr opens by revealing the roots of Britain’s deep-seated distrust of fanaticism. Some interesting articles to read.
Having Right and Being Right
Juliet Everts Robb reflects on the difference between having right and being right. A Frenchmen makes a clear distinction between j’ai le droit and j’ai raison, but the English speaking part of our planet seems to confuse both expressions.
International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jan., 1920), pp. 196-212
Epistemology
Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one’s own mind? Understood more broadly, epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry.
Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims. In other words, epistemology primarily addresses the following questions: “What is knowledge?”, “How is knowledge acquired?”, and “What do people know?”
Introductory resources:
Both links come with links for further reading.
The moral instinct
“Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch,” explains psychologist Steven Pinker in an entertaining and enlightening article on the workings of the moral instinct. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.
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