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Dan Fincke hosts Philosophers’ Blog Carnival # 133. All you know-nothing peeps who think philosophy is just wankery, read and learn. Just a few selected teasers – Thinking about the “vagueness” charge leveled against Occupy Wall Street, Benjamin S. Nelson, at Talking Philosophy explores virtues that listeners need to have before they can go blame [...]
Archive for October, 2011
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Secular morality in a nutshell
October 31st, 2011 
Ophelia Benson Someone who commented on a very flimsy piece by Keith Ward at Comment is Free said a good thing. There is a constant error made in many of these articles regarding the definition and scope of religion. Religion is not the study of ethics, natural science, philosophy or astronomy and cannot generate informed hypotheses on [...]
Tags: The demonic power
October 31st, 2011 Ophelia Benson Halloween wasn’t unalloyed fun for Libby Anne when she was growing up. [Digression. Actually I don't find it unalloyed fun myself these days. I don't find all the corpses and graves all that funny, and they certainly are presented as jokey. It gets on my nerves, frankly. Just for one thing, isn't it kind of [...]
All of empirical inference
October 30th, 2011 Ophelia Benson There’s another entry for the What to call it problem. It comes from a comment by Richard Wein on Dan’s post replying to Dr Coyne. Much of the confusion over “science” and “scientism” arises from the tendency of some New Atheists (including Coyne) to stretch the word “science” to mean all of empirical inference. I think [...]
How can we get pigs to fly?
October 30th, 2011 Ophelia Benson The philosophical primate has some thoughts on being asked to do six impossible things before breakfast. The Faculty Senate asked for his input on a new initiative from the state legislature and board of regents. He responded to the following question: 2. Given increased enrollment and smaller budgets, how can we maintain and improve student success [...]
Be firm but not too firm, dogmatic but not too dogmatic
October 29th, 2011 Ophelia Benson To continue… What I call dogmatophobia is the liberal fear of being judgmental of the beliefs of others. Because everyone has a right to her opinion and no one has a monopoly on the truth, there is a tendency to think that any kind of assertion of a truth, other than of the blandest factual [...]
Being truthful must sometimes trump being nice
October 29th, 2011 Ophelia Benson Reading Julian’s latest. I can’t wait until I’ve read the whole thing to comment on this: [Mark] Vernon’s advocacy of passionate agnosticism offers soothing camomile tea to those jittery after the triple espressos of the new atheists and religious fundamentalists. Since he is as genial in person as he is on the page, attacking him [...]
QED next March
October 29th, 2011 Ophelia Benson There’s a fun thing going on in Manchester next March: QED 2012. I’ll be there – as will Steve Jones and David Aaaronovitch and Edzard Ernst among others - and Maryam Namazie! Maryam and I finally get to meet; we’re excited.
You do the math
October 29th, 2011 Ophelia Benson Jerry Coyne has posted (with permission) an email exchange with Dan Barker. JC asked DB – evangelical turned atheist and co-president of the FFRF – “what he thought about the accommodationist claim that promoting compatibility between religion and science could turn the faithful towards science.” Barker’s answer is interesting. I think you are right. I don’t [...]
In which the rights of God are assured
October 29th, 2011 Ophelia Benson The “soft-spoken Islamic scholar” Rachid Ghannouchi has nice plans for Tunisia, he tells us. “We will continue this revolution to realize its aims of a Tunisia that is free, independent, developing and prosperous in which the rights of God, the Prophet, women, men, the religious and the non-religious are assured because Tunisia is for everyone,” [...]
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