A Thinking Reed

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

Philosophy

  • Nature’s “transparent rational beauty”

    The kinds of considerations I was discussing in the last post are very similar to those that physicist-priest John Polkinghorne offered as part of a “modest” natural theology in his book Belief in God in an Age of Science. I posted on this several years back, but here’s the relevant portion of the post reproduced: Read more

  • The reasons for reason

    Gene Callahan is going back and forth with economist Brad DeLong about philosopher Thomas Nagel’s recent book in which Nagel argues (or so I gather–I haven’t read it) that a strictly materialist understanding of evolution is insufficient to account for the human mind’s ability to understand reality. While I haven’t read Nagel’s most recent book, Read more

  • Liberals aren’t sexual relativists

    In an article that otherwise makes some good points about conservatives’ “populist” defense of junk food, Rod Dreher just can’t resist taking a swipe at a time-honored liberal strawman: For conservatives, it may be revealing to compare the defensiveness with which many of us discuss what we do in the dining room to the defensiveness Read more

  • Speaking of equality…

    From this really interesting interview with philosopher Elizabeth Anderson: The idea that human beings are fundamentally equals from a moral point of view is ancient. I suspect it can be traced all the way back to the origins of monotheism, in the idea that we are all equally creatures of God, all made in God’s Read more

  • Animal rights is more than Peter Singer

    Tony Jones posted a link to a Peter Singer article arguing, among other things, that animal-welfare concerns should trump claims to religious liberty in cases like humane slaughter laws. Whatever the merits of Singer’s argument (Brandon pretty thoroughly demolishes it here), the post at Tony Jones’ blog provides an example of how Christians often react to Read more

  • A simple argument for vegetarianism

    The New York Times “Ethicist” column recently challeged its readers to submit essays making the case for why it’s ethically okay to eat meat. The submissions are supposed to offer a pro-meat answer to the question “Whether it is right to eat animals in the first place, at least when human survival is not at Read more

  • Biblical inerrancy, the goodness of God, and our capacity for truth

    I came across this letter of C.S. Lewis’s on the blog Undeception: Dear Mr. Beversluis, Yes. On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua. I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the dangers of believing in a God Read more

  • American “multarchy”

    Philosopher Gary Gutting writes that America doesn’t have a democracy, but a “mutlarchy”–a system that includes elements of the five types of government delineated by Plato in The Republic. These are —aristocracy: “rule by the ‘best’, that is, by experts specially trained at governance” —timarchy: “rule by those guided by their courage and sense of Read more

  • What does Oxford have to do with Jerusalem?

    I’m reading Keith Ward’s More than Matter? and found it interesting to learn that two of Ward’s teachers were the Oxford philosophers Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer. Ryle was famous for characterizing Cartesian dualism as “the ghost in the machine,” and Ayer was the famed proponent of logical positivism. Ward says that he came to Read more

  • John Macquarrie and process theology

    I’m currently re-reading Scottish Anglican theologian John Macquarrie‘s marvelously lucid Principles of Christian Theology (first published in 1966; I’m reading the substantially revised version that was published about 10 years later). I first read it as an undergrad when my interest in existentialism was at its height. In the first part of the book, Macquarrie Read more