A Thinking Reed

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

Philosophy

  • New social ethics blog

    Readers may be interested in this new(ish) blog: The Moral Mindfield. The about page says that it is “intended as an open forum for the discussion of the ethical dimensions of society and culture. …informed by philosophy, theology, and social theory, as well as other academic disciplines.” If I’ve got this right, the contributers are Read more

  • The radical Lewis

    I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that many C. S. Lewis fans–maybe especially his many evangelical admirers–don’t know that Lewis wrote a pamphlet for the British Anti-Vivisection Society. This essay, reprinted later in God in the Dock, anticipates some key arguments since made by philosophical proponents of animal rights. Lewis posits Read more

  • Human “exceptionalism” as moral exclusion

    In his review of Wesley Smith’s book that I linked to below, Angus Taylor puts his finger on exactly what has long bothered me about Smith’s rhetoric of “human exceptionalism”: Even if can be shown … that all human beings deserve an elevated moral status, it is not clear why this elevated status should entail Read more

  • Friday links

    – Chris Hayes: Postcard from Palestine – Endangered red wolves being hunted to extinction – Tea partiers fantasize about a “constitutionally pure” government – Jean Kazez on Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape – On not really believing in heaven – Corporations gain privacy rights as people lose them – Soldiers against torture – A Read more

  • A world without carnivores?

    I meant to link earlier to this piece from the NYT Opinionator blog by philosopher Jeff McMahan. He poses the following question: Suppose that we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones. Or suppose that we could intervene genetically, so that currently carnivorous species would gradually evolve into Read more

  • Whitehead on value and subjectivity

    A quick addendum to the process theology post: I decided I was interested in finding out a bit more about Whitehead’s theory of value because of the role value plays in his metaphysics, and – lo and behold! – there’s an article by John Cobb called “Whitehead’s Theory of Value.” As a bonus, the first Read more

  • Summary thoughts on process theology

    Last night I finished Cobb and Griffin’s introduction to process theology, so I wanted to get some thoughts down on the general Whiteheadian perspective. I think the expanded name sometimes used – process-relational theology – is actually more helpful because both elements, process and relation, are key to understanding what this school of thought is Read more

  • Whitehead on theological revisionism

    I don’t know why I’ve suddenly been interested in reading Whitehead, but after Adventures of Ideas I turned to an earlier work–Religion in the Making. Here you can see the germs of a “Whiteheadian” doctrine of God, particularly in his critique of traditional notions of omnipotence and transcendence: This worship of glory arising from power Read more

  • Whitehead on the task of theology

    In his book Adventures of Ideas, Alfred North Whitehead criticizes “liberal clergy and laymen” of the 18th and 19th centuries for rejecting systematic theology. The problem with the old theology wasn’t its intellectual or systematic character, Whitehead says, but its insistence on “dogmatic finality.” Metaphysics–or systematic, rational thought about the universe rooted in our deepest Read more

  • Progress in religion

    The progress of religion is defined by the denunciation of gods. The keynote of idolatry is contentment with the prevalent gods. – Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas Read more