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25 Apr 09

Evolutionary Ethics « gonepublic: philosophy, politics, & public life

  • Brooks finds much in this view to be nice: it emphasizes our social nature and our tendency toward cooperation; it also “explains the haphazard way most of us lead our lives without destroying dignity and choice”; and it turns our focus to how people are in fact motivated more by “feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central.
08 Apr 09

Op-Ed Columnist - The End of Philosophy - NYTimes.com

As our brain sorts out of the thousands of bits of info it takes special note of those things your system of values and interest. We take note of those things that have been socially enriched objects and concepts

www.nytimes.com/...07Brooks.html - Preview

morality philosophy brooks

  • Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.
  • Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.
  • 4 more annotations...
11 Nov 08

The problem of consciousness meets "Intelligent Design"

  • "According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one."
  • "According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one."
  • 3 more annotations...
02 Oct 08

philosophy.com

  • classical republican virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and prudence, which are the political virtues that contribute to the ancient sense of contributing to the survival and flourishing of a polis,
  • you 'can test their adequacy by imagining a person or a community that notably lacks one of them. A loveless life is terrible; a community without justice is, too.'
  • 2 more annotations...

The coming only is sacred: self-creation and social solidarity in Richard Rorty's secular Eschatology | Cross Currents | Find Articles at BNET.com

  • Walter Rauschenbusch was declared the father of the Social Gospel.
  • Richard Rorty's socialist parents, Walter Rauschenbusch's daughter Winifred and her husband James Rorty, moved from churchly circles into the cosmopolitan company of the old New York Intellectuals and at least for a season loved Trotsky more than Jesus. Their son Richard was born in 1931 into a family circle of leftist politics and very progressive social hopes. Frequent guests in the Rorty home included John Dewey, Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling, the Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca and John Frank (Trotsky's secretary who lived with the Rortys under an assumed name). Richard Rorty confesses that as a boy of 12 he knew the point of being human was to give one's life to fight against social injustice. He also knew the temptations and terrors of radical politics. He knew that Stalin had ordered the assassinations of Trotsky, Tresca, Frank and scores of other anti-totalitarian leftist leaders and intellectuals.

The coming only is sacred: self-creation and social solidarity in Richard Rorty's secular Eschatology | Cross Currents | Find Articles at BNET.com

  • A pragmatist believes that human thinking and acting, from sophisticated theory to practical mechanics, are driven by the need to respond to problems: thought and action are provoked by tensions between ourselves as needy organisms and our environment that must satisfy these needs.
04 May 08

Wittgenstein's Concept of a Language Game

  • Giving specialized meaning to old
    terms allows philosophers to say
    things that might otherwise be
    difficult to say, but it can also
    cause havoc for the reader. If you
    make the natural assumption that
    these terms are being used in their
    usual sense, then the text you are
    reading will seem strange and
    paradoxical (Shawver, 1996). 
  • Think of this as a model of language
    in which everything has been
    simplified. We sometimes use language
    more or less like this in our own
    culture, but in our own culture we
    would throw in a few more words and
    people would end up using language to
    do more than fetch a few stones.
    "Hurry up" the supervisor in
    our culture might yell out. But in
    Wittgenstein's language game,
    (2),  side comments like this are
    not possible. After all, he
    said,  "conceive of this as
    a complete primitive language."
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