A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Philosophy

  • No rights without duties?

    A surprisingly common argument against animal rights goes like this: only beings capable of exercising moral choice and reasoning have rights. Animals don’t exercise moral choice and reasoning (i.e. they aren’t “moral agents”). Therefore animals don’t have rights. I say that the frequency with which this argument is made is surprising because it implicitly denies Read more

  • Up from atheism

    Warning: lengthy post ahead! I first became a professed atheist at about age 15; I decided that I had seen through all the illusions of those around me, those unthinking, dogmatic, hypocritical, narrow-minded small-town types I had grown up with. I literally announced to my parents that I would no longer be attending church (I Read more

  • Plantinga on Dawkins and Calvinism and (vs?) philosophy

    Alvin Plantinga, probably the most important contemporary Christian philosopher working in the analytic tradition, has a lengthy review of Dawkins’ God Delusion. I have to say that I have almost no appetite for these back-and-forth polemics; I was an atheist for a considerable period of time and don’t feel much need to revisit it. But Read more

  • Animal cloning and "granting things their space"

    I don’t suppose it’ll come as a surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I think that cloning animals for meat and milk is a bad idea. Leaving aside the health considerations, what bothers me is that it’s one more step in reducing animals (and, by implication, the rest of nature) to the status Read more

  • Stephen R.L. Clark’s "anarcho-conservatism"

    I’m on vacation, visiting the wife’s ancestral homeland of Indiana. Blessedly free of online distractions for the most part. Hence the relative dearth of posting. But I have been reading a really interesting book by philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark called The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics. Clark has written on a variety of topics, Read more

  • Blessed Spinoza

    Hillary Putnam reviews a new book on Spinoza in the New York Observer. I have a longstanding fascination with Spinoza. As an undergrad I became obsessed with his writing and all the secondary literature I could get my hands on. Harry Austryn Wolfson’s book in particular (which sadly appears to be out of print) was Read more

  • A Marxist defends God

    Terry Eagleton lays the smack down on Richard Dawkins (via Brandon). The influence of Herbert McCabe, O.P., one of Eagleton’s friends and mentors, really comes through here. In his book After Theory, Eagleton even argues for a kind of Thomistic Aristotelianism as a philosophical foundation for left-wing politics and an alternative to postmodernist nihilism (See Read more

  • Is our atheists learning?

    Thomas wonders why high profile atheist provocateurs like Richard Dawkins seem to know so little about the religions they criticize and frequently traffic in straw-man arguments. He also excerpts a take down of Dawkins’ latest book by agnostic Thomas Nagel.* Scientific popularizers like Dawkins often seem to think that their expertise in one field translates Read more

  • Double effect double standard

    This post by the Bull Moose blogger (via Marvin) brings to mind a point made by Robert Holmes in his excellent On War and Morality (I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may not get all the details right). Pacifists and anti-interventionists are often criticized for their unwillingness to take up Read more

  • "String conjecture"?

    Thomas at Without Authority, himself an honest-to-goodness scientist, points us to this article from Gregg Easterbrook about a new book arguing that string theory isn’t really science, but something more like metaphysical speculation. I’d be the last one to claim anything more than a layman’s knowledge of current physics (at best), but it has always Read more