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Lewis on transposition
C. S. Lewis’s essay “Transposition” is available in his collection The Weight of Glory, and also online here. It is, both philosophically and theologically, very deep, illuminating the relationship...
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Stupid rhetorical tricks
In honor of David Letterman’s final show tonight, let’s look at a variation on his famous “Stupid pet tricks” routine. It involves people rather animals, but lots of Pavlovian frenzied salivating. I...
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D. B. Hart and the “terrorism of obscurantism”
Many years ago, Steven Postrel and I interviewed John Searle for Reason magazine. Commenting on his famous dispute with Jacques Derrida, Searle remarked:With Derrida, you can hardly misread him,...
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Aristotle watches Blade Runner
You can never watch Blade Runner too many times, and I’m due for another viewing. In D. E. Wittkower’s anthology Philip K. Dick and Philosophy, there’s an article by Ross Barham which makes some...
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Religion and superstition
The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, edited by Graham Oppy, has just been published. My essay “Religion and Superstition” is among the chapters. The book’s table of contents...
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Neo-Scholastic Essays
I am pleased to announce the publication of Neo-Scholastic Essays, a collection of previously published academic articles of mine from the last decade, along with some previously unpublished papers and...
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Review of Wilson and Scruton
In the Spring 2015 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, I review Edward O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence and Roger Scruton’s The Soul of the World.
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Cross on Scotus on causal series
Duns Scotus has especially interesting and important things to say about the distinction between causal series ordered accidentally and those ordered essentially -- a distinction that plays a key role...
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Love and sex roundup
Current events in the Catholic Church and in U.S. politics being as they are, it seems worthwhile to put together a roundup of blog posts and other readings on sex, romantic love, and sexual morality...
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There’s no such thing as “natural atheology”
In his brief and (mostly) tightly argued book God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga writes:[S]ome theologians and theistic philosophers have tried to give successful arguments or proofs for the...
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Marriage and The Matrix
Suppose a bizarre skeptic seriously proposed -- not as a joke, not as dorm room bull session fodder, but seriously -- that you, he, and everyone else were part of a computer-generated virtual reality...
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Religion and the Social Sciences
Check out the recently published Religion and the Social Sciences: Conversations with Robert Bellah and Christian Smith, edited by R. R. Reno and Barbara McClay. The volume is a collection of essays...
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Is it funny because it’s true?
In a recent article in National Review, Ian Tuttle tells us that “standup comedy is colliding with progressivism.” He notes that comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Gilbert Gottfried have complained of...
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Dragging the net
My recent Claremont Review of Books review of Scruton’s Soul of the World and Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existenceis now available for free online.Should we expect a sound proof to convince...
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The comedy keeps coming
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but while we’re on the subject of humor, here’s another mistake that is often made in discussions of it: failing to identify precisely which aspect of the...
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Pigliucci logic
In a recent article (to which I linked last week), philosopher Massimo Pigliucci wrote:[W]hile some people may very well be “Islamophobes” (i.e., they may genuinely harbor an irrational prejudice...
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The absolute truth about relativism
I don’t write very often about relativism. Part of the reason is that few if any of the critics I find myself engaging with -- for example, fellow analytic philosophers of a secular or progressive...
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Risible animals
Just for laughs, one more brief post on the philosophy of humor. (Two recent previous posts on the subject can be found here and here.) Let’s talk about the relationship between rationality and our...
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Poverty no, inequality si
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt is famous for his expertise in detecting bullshit. In a new book he sniffs out an especially noxious instance of the stuff: the idea that there is something immoral about...
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All Scientists Should Beg Lawrence Krauss to Shut the Hell Up Already
In The New Yorker, physicist and professional amateur philosopher Lawrence Krauss calls on all scientists to become “militant atheists.” First club meeting pictured at left. I respond at Public...
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