Author: Huenemann

Mike put me onto this link to an NPR “This I believe” segment, where the author extols the power of logic to make equals of us all.

… can be found here. Readers of this blog might find the following link of interest:

Magic, science, and the supernatural

Here is an interesting book review by Simon Blackburn of Alan Sokal’s latest book. Some years ago, Sokal, a physicist, submitted an essay on “the hermeneutics of quantum gravity” to a postmodernist journal and the essay was published. Then Sokal revealed that he made the whole thing up just by pasting together obscure phrases in vogue by postmodernists at the time. Har, har; everyone laughed at those silly postmodernists. But what is the moral of the story?

Here is a nice section from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy‘s entry on nothingness (written by Roy Sorenson). I think some of the thinking about emptiness has peculiar philosophical brilliance: the reasoning always seems “airtight,” so to speak, though we know something must have gone wrong somewhere.

Here is an interesting essay. An excerpt:

That compassion is natural to human beings there is no question. But does it pertain to our higher or to our lower natures? As even or precisely those who take compassion for a virtue acknowledge, it is an emotion. Can an emotion be a virtue? Yes, if the keynote of virtue is naturalness in the sense of spontaneity or authenticity. No, if what defines virtue is the perfection of our nature through the triumph of reason over passion. For this reason the long history of thought about compassion (stretching back at least 2,500 years now) has revolved around just this issue.