Can you Cyrano de Bergerac your moral philosophy?

December 6, 2012 By 50 Comments
school of athens

Yesterday, I linked to Luke Muelhauser's commentary on the inability of philosophers to come to consensus.  He's continued on the topic, proposing a curriculum for building better philosophers in "Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant." His list of recommended topics include Bayesian statistics, machine learning, mathematical logic, game theory, cognitive neuroscience, etc.  (Go to the link to see his syllabus).  When you look over all the prerequisites, you can … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy Tagged With: 50 Comments

The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Philosophers

December 5, 2012 By 46 Comments
"What sat in those three chairs was three men, though hard to recognize as men till you looked closely. Their hair, which was gray, had grown over their eyes till it almost concealed their faces, and their beards had grown over the table, climbing round and entwining plates and goblets as brambles entwine a fence, until, all mixed in one great mat of hair, they flowed over the edge and down to the floor. And from their heads the hair hung over the backs of their chairs so that they were wholly hidden. In fact the three men were nearly all hair."

I know there are some rumblings in yesterday's thread about sin, judgment, and necessity about my being tardy to reply to comments.  When there's such a fast discussion (over 100 comments in 12 hours, I can't pop in and out as much as I'd like to.   I did quite appreciate Steve Schuler's comment that, even though my tardiness was frustrating, "For my purposes the best aspect of Leah’s blog are the comments threads and the overall civil and thoughtful exchanges I am able to read here." … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Epistemology/Philosophy Tagged With: 46 Comments

The theologians Chris Hallquist doesn’t believe in

November 28, 2012 By 146 Comments
uncredible hallq

Chris Hallquist (who blogs in the Patheos Atheist channel as the Uncredible Hallq) is in the process of writing a book tentatively titled Angry Atheists?: Why the Backlash Against Popular Atheism Is Silly. As he writes it, he's posting drafts of chapters on his blog to invite comment, sort out confusion, etc.   The most recent chapter he's revised and posted is to be Chapter Two: The many gods I don’t believe in (yours included). Since I guess I'm in the intended audience for the … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Epistemology/Philosophy, Reviews/Recommendations Tagged With: 146 Comments