In January of 1972 BBC Two broadcasted a four episode television series called Ways of Seeing written and presented by John Berger (1926-2017). The series was subsequently adapted into the book Ways of Seeing which was published in 1973. Both… Read more ›
Classic utilitarianism, whose classic proponents were Jeremy Bentham (1789), John Stuart Mill (1861), and Henry Sidgwick (1907), is a moral theory which doesn’t consider motives and acts as having any intrinsic moral value. Rather, motives and acts can only be… Read more ›
It is easy to lose our sense of wonder for things around us. Of course, we may wonder when confronted with things out of the ordinary. But shouldn’t it be more common to wonder about, well, everything? Perhaps not. After… Read more ›
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849 It is March 21, 2020 and the coronavirus is a pandemic threatening everyone on Earth. In my relative isolation of social distancing, I have had more time to read and I was drawn to a tale… Read more ›
I was recently asked to give a talk on what makes relationships beneficial. Since Valentine’s Day was approaching, I decided to offer a set of insights based on three philosophical theories of love which I cover in my philosophy of love… Read more ›
In earlier posts I briefly presented both St. Augustine’s (see here) and Leibniz’s (see here) arguments for God from eternal truth. Since I find this underrepresented approach to demonstrating God’s existence both fascinating and promising, I decided to present my… Read more ›
In the previous two posts (go here) I considered various formulations of the privation theory of evil and considered various objections to it. Now let’s consider some reasons to embrace the theory. (1) The privation theory can offer a comprehensive… Read more ›
In part one of this three part series I gave a brief overview of some influential formulations of the privation theory of evil before suggesting that we accept Peter King’s concise and convincing one in Evil: A History (Oxford, 2019):… Read more ›
Introduction In the previous post I presented some contemporary scientific views on evil and argued both for their importance and their limitations. We saw that such views can be construed as natural evil insofar as they see evil as a… Read more ›
Evil, after many years of neglect in ethics, has returned as a topic of interest since at least 9/11. One of the things that characterizes this return is the use of science. Traditionally, evil has been understood as a phenomenon… Read more ›
Many philosophers of the enlightenment, inspired by the scientific revolution, thought of nature as a vast machine rather than a living organism. For example, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) opens his masterpiece Leviathan (1651) with some startling claims that reduce life to a series… Read more ›
Those of us who believe in the truth typically accept contingent truths or, to use possible worlds semantics, truths that are true in some worlds and false in others. For example, the sentence ‘Dwight Goodyear was born in 1970’ expresses a… Read more ›
Our experiences of beauty and duty appear to be very different. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), in his book Critique of Judgment, argued that judgments of the beautiful must be “disinterested.” This means that we make these judgments (1) without concern for the truth; (2) without… Read more ›
Obviously one of the most important general and fundamental questions is: What is truth? This is a difficult question—if only because we tend to assume a certain conception of the truth as we look for the truth about the truth!… Read more ›
The American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) offered a groundbreaking account of art in his Art as Experience (1934). This account, which reorients our understanding of art towards aesthetic experience, forges profound connections with education, democracy, and evolution. In what follows,… Read more ›