I’ve already blogged once about reading Freud’s Last Session, a two person play that is an extended argument between C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, but now I’ve gotten the chance to see it performed. (And it looks like it’s running through May at the New World Stages in NYC, if anyone fancies seeing it.) When I saw it, I tried to keep score in my head of who was winning or who had the upper hand, since I was particularly... Read more
After reading my post on decidedly undivine First Causes, one commenter had a question about my position on free will. I had referenced a quote from Arcadia, If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula... Read more
This post is part of a series on Aquinas, Aristotle, and Edward Feser’s explanation of them both. I said in my first post on Edward Feser’s book that I have deep Aristotelian sympathies. The four causes seem like a coherent way of describing the world, even if I’m not confident they’re the territory, not just an approximated map. But if I’m willing to give a little ground there, how do I avoid believing in a First Mover? That was the... Read more
— 1 — It’s almost time for my new distance learning CS courses from Stanford to start up (yay!), so I definitely want to lead off these quick takes by linking to Wired’s interview with Peter Norvig, who taught the AI course I took last term and works with Google to design self-driving cars. Wired: [H]ow useful is the Turing test? Norvig: I don’t like it that much, in part because I don’t care about the philosophy angle. I want... Read more
Like many sites, I’m drawing attention to SOPA and PIPA, two terrible laws that threaten the web. You can check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a rundown of the bills, but here are some lowlights: SOPA creates a guilty until proven innocent standard for copyright. Instead of filing a complaint about specific infringing content, copyright holders can knock the entire website hosting the content off the web. The Attorney General could de-list websites from search engines.So not only would... Read more
For the last two days, the story of Amelia Rivera has kept showing up in my RSS reader. Amelia Rivera is a three-year-old girl who is developmentally disabled and suffers from Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. She needs a kidney transplant to live, and the hospital her parents went to declined to place her on the transplant list and also refused to let a family member donate a kidney to the girl. The other posts on Patheos on this topic (You love your... Read more
There was a request in the comments that I do a post on Transgender issues in the same way I did a post on bisexuality for National Coming Out Day (which was followed by bisexuality Q&A and a post on queer political tactics). I thought those posts prompted some pretty helpful discussion, so I’m glad to set up another opportunity to go over the basics, but this time I have to tag on some major caveats: I’m not trans (well,... Read more
As promised yesterday, this is the kickoff of my analysis of and questions about Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism. Yesterday, in the index post, I pasted in Feser’s summary of Aristotle’s Four Causes which you may want to refer back to. I’m interested in Feser’s book because he’s making the pitch that if you believe in moral order and some kind of telos for people, Christianity will follow inexorably. Since I fit the first... Read more
I’ve just finished Sara Miles’s memoir Take this Bread: A Radical Conversion, but I don’t think I can write my usual style of review. Miles was raised by atheists (although she had missionaries a couple generations back), is a liberal lesbian, and converted to Episcopalianism in midlife. I’m always interested in the logic of converts, especially when they’re a good match for me demographically, but Miles and I are way too far apart conceptually for me to have anything substantive to say... Read more
I ran into a Dominican at an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences event in DC, and now I’m reading and arguing about Edward Feser‘s The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the Last Atheism with him and another brother at the priory. This seems like a nice opportunity to explore the ‘non-nihilistic metaphysics logically require theism and probably Christianity’ pitch that I’ve gotten from plenty of Christians and more than a few atheists. Hopefully the discussion will put me... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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