Arbitrary Marks

We’ll see if my post can live up to the title I’ve just crammed into my Wordpress draft. I had a wide-ranging conversation today with a fellow student at the U of C about Empiricism & the Philosophy of Mind by Wilfrid Sellars. I was so disappointed that I didn’t have with me 1) the previous blog post and 2) the text itself. However, since Sellars has come up in several places recently, I made myself come back home to do some skimming and put together the puzzle pieces we were discussing.

From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force. Matthew 11:12.

I asked Andrew Simone to be a guest blogger here, quite aware that he would write in a vastly different style than is usual for this blog. As much as I enjoy Michel Foucault (in fact, I just bought his Genealogy of Knowledge with my Borders Bucks yesterday), I’m not a continental philosopher. Okay, I’m not a philosopher, I’m a philosophy student. But the tradition which I imbide regularly is analytic.

I’ve always wondered how far apart the two “traditions” really are. After Foucault, I am curious about the discourse in which we label philosophies as “continental” or “analytic” and what kinds of assumptions those entail about what knowledge is.

The reason I wrote the parable in the first place was to manifest how choice may mean violence, specifically choice for philosophical or religious perspectives. If you, say, decided to choose Buddhism over Christianity (or vise versa), then the fact that you find both choices is cheapening, it commodifies them–at least in the West.
However, what [...]

I’ll let ck’s introduction stand as is, even if a person would have to have tasted a few bottles of Lafite before she could ever begin to be called a connoisseur. I will, however, present an autobiographical parable which will give you a sense of my cognitive posture, critique of contemporary thought, and my [...]

What if there existed a perfectly loving god? What would that entail with respect to 1) what such a god would value and 2) our epistemic access to this god’s existence?

This question is not my own, but that of my philosophy of religion professor, Paul Moser. He reminds me of a seminary professor I had, Michael Williams. I would bet that the two disagree on some important confessional matters, namely, the inerrancy and historicity of the biblical texts. However, they have two shared mantras: “god is not god’s name” and “why assume god is a foundationalist?”

If, for Kierkegaard, Religiousness A is characterized by an individual’s attempts to achieve self-annihilation in order to attain god[1], then the secret, discussed in Four Upbuilding Discourses is that such religiosity is ultimately futile. The self, he says, is “capable of nothing at all” with regard to the external.
This is an [...]

Due to coursework (imagine that), I’ve procrastinated on writing this post. Too, it seems like I’m painted into a corner, so to speak. If I try to avoid skepticism about personal communication, then am I committed to embracing any claims about a Superbeing? But skepticism about human communication and identity leads us [...]

Because I haven’t gotten any bites on my earlier post about religious experience, I’m going to wait another day before putting up my tentative thoughts. Take a look at it and see if you have any intuitions.
In the meantime, I am going to draw your attention to a new site which purports to be [...]

On my way in to work this morning, I listened to Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time on audiobook.  (Public libraries are a great way to take some of the pain out of lengthy commutes.)  I’m at the point in the prophet’s life where he has recited–then retracted–a sura that elevated three of [...]

This question is one that already has been tackled throughout the history of philosophy, but it’s the kind of prolegomena that I need to do for my own studies. It’s the topic for my paper in philosophy of religion, so expect future posts on it. What kind of evidence would support the claim [...]