Author: Huenemann

About a month ago, David Johnson published an essay on 3 Quarks Daily taking on a group of atheists everyone talks about – Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris. He labeled them “undergraduate atheists”, following Mark Johnston, who also has taken them on. (I haven’t seen Johnston’s work, so I don’t know why he invents that name, but I’m guessing he means to downgrade their mental sophistication. For this I am sorry, students; many of you I know to be more sophisticated intellectually than Hitchens & Co. Johnston & Johnson are the poorer for not having met you, and for having developed a poorly-considered label.)

Johnson argues that these unsophisticated atheists assume a thesis, that humanity is better off without religion, that is not obviously true. He recounts a short story by Miguel Unamuno about a priest in a small town who manages to convert the story’s main character, Lazaro, to his point of view. But this priest is not himself exactly a theist:

What [the priest] believes in, rather, is administering to the needs of the villagers, in putting on such a convincing performance of dedication to Christ that they all believe he is a saint and have their faith in the Church and in life everlasting sustained. Lazaro’s “conversion,” then, is one consistent with atheism. He becomes a lay-minister of sorts under San Manuel and eventually dies a Catholic.

Unamuno’s philosophical beliefs about faith, and how they relate to this issue, are explained a little further in this follow-up essay in 3QD by Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan Meis. They quote the great Spanish philosopher: “Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.”

Anyway, these are a couple of brief blog posts to reflect upon. Enjoy!

for your viewing pleasure:

 

Welcome to Spring 2014! I hope your classes fill you with new and exciting ideas.

And to get you started, here is a link to a brief essay on whether Plato is right in his criticisms of democracy. The conclusion: “Our claim is that democracy is the political manifestation of our aspiration to rationally pursue the truth; it is, in other words, the political correlate to our pursuit of wisdom. Accordingly, democracy is the only system of government fit for a philosopher.”

Intermountain West Student Philosophy Conference
March 20th – 22nd, 2014
Hosted by the University of Utah Department of Philosophy
Keynote Speaker: Sarah McGrath
Princeton University
Plenary Speaker: Jacob Stegenga
University of Utah
Submissions Due: January 13th, 2014
Papers should be no more than 8 pages or 3,000 words, whichever is shorter. Papers should be submitted as a .doc or a .pdf file. Papers should be prepared for blind review and should include a separate file with the article’s title and the author’s name, email, and university affiliation. Please submit papers to: uuiwgpc@gmail.com

Philosopher Thomas Nagel recently wrote a book, Mind & Cosmos, which has caused quite a ruckus. The ruckus is due to the fact that he has long been a well-respected, influential philosopher, and yet this book challenges the adequacy of naturalism and evolution to explain our world. Many philosophers have risen up to defend this orthodoxy and have tripped over themselves in flagging Nagel’s errors. So it is nice to see what reads as an even-handed consideration of Nagel’s overall philosophical approach. Indeed, it’s convinced me to buy and read the book. An excerpt from the review, explaining Nagel’s “metaphysical rationalism”:

The starting point is this powerful proposition: “The intelligibility of the world is no accident.” That is, nature is at least in some measure rationally comprehensible. There cannot even be a hope for science without this premise, and that we have science is the strongest evidence of its plausibility. At the same time, nature has generated creatures capable of rationally comprehending it. In Nagel’s words, “Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings.” And that is the heart of the matter: “The ability of creatures like us to arrive at such truth, or even to think about it, requires explanation.” We owe ourselves an account of “how the natural order is disposed to generate beings capable of comprehending it.”