“Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and — thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never solves anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler would referee. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than …
In philosophical circles, Dave Chalmers is a bit of a rock star. This can largely be attributed to his book, “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory”, in which he contended that a fundamental aspect to our mental lives was being ignored by philosophers and cognitive scientists. In a nutshell, he argued that …
As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring …
The common meaning of the idiom ‘wag the dog’ is to divert attention away from something important to something unimportant such that the former is forgotten in favor of the latter. I always found this puzzling because to me, the idiom evokes an image of a dog totally unaware that he’s being manipulated by his …
“If you think you know the one thing that causes people to commit suicide, please let us know, because we don’t know what it is.” -Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli A few weeks ago, a friend of mine posted a link on his Facebook wall announcing his participation in a group called …
As Don Draper, the philandering advertising genius of Mathew Weiner’s fantastic TV show ‘Mad Men’ is fond of saying, “if you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation”. In a recent NY Times piece, Professor Colin McGinn proposes to just that with Philosophy. In his words: Our current name is harmful because it posits …
What follows is a letter to the editor I wrote in response to Professor Jerry Coyne’s guest column in the 02JAN12 edition of USA Today entitled “Why You Don’t Really Have Free Will”. The original column can be found here. -=.=- Jerry Coyne, an eminent professor hailing from one of the most prestigious universities in …
Albert Camus once posited that the only really important question in Philosophy is the question of suicide. His line of thinking was that if we accept the existentialist contention that the only meaning in the world comes from within, that everything that is simply exists and it’s an individual consciousness that orders the world into …
I don’t get it. After years of aggravating their user base by frequent changes a consistently wonky interface, privacy concerns, and a buggy set of mobile platforms, why hasn’t someone out facebook-ed facebook? I’ll grant you that most of the world is already on facebook thus creating a natural recalcitrance towards switching. I’ll further grant …
For those of you who don’t remember, Plato was a philosopher in ancient Greece who wrote a corpus of philosophical dialogues. He was a student of arguably the most famous philosopher, Socrates, and he honored his former teacher by featuring him in many of his works. One of them is the Phaedrus in which Socrates …
