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MOOCs, Books, Kooks and Federalist 10

Coursera woos me to MOOC through my college email.  I haven’t succumbed yet, but only because they haven’t offered anything interesting enough.  I signed up for one course on logic, but backed out after clarification over the goal of the course which was to prove through logic . . . . Continue Reading »

Gnostic Meditations and other stuff!

Here are some insightful excerpts from, “Secret Cinema: A Gnostic Vision in Film,”  a book by Wake Forest University English Professor, Eric Wilson: http://www.voegelinview.com/secret-cinema-gnostic-film-pt1.html Professor Peters, a clever writer and provocateur at The . . . . Continue Reading »

Can Reason Withstand the Death of God?

Freddie has written a post that forces me into the odd position of defending Sam Harris; the crux of which is the claim that once we accept the human mind as being a contingent accident of evolution, we necessarily must abandon any faith in the intellectual edifices constructed by such minds: For . . . . Continue Reading »

Onwards! Ever Onwards!

Via Julian , I see that Yglesias has spun a narrative : For the past 65-70 years—and especially for the past 30 years since the end of the civil rights argument—American politics has been dominated by controversy over the size and scope of the welfare state. Today, that argument is . . . . Continue Reading »

“The Unsustainable Autonomy of Reason”

When was the last time you heard a transhumanist say something like this? . . . the Enlightenment project of Reason to which many transhumanists are committed is self-erosive and requires nonrational validation. Transhumanist advocates for Bayesianism and transcending cognitive biases need to . . . . Continue Reading »

Eli’s Coming

“I have hidden your Word in my heart,” Psalm 119:11 The above quote gives us the leitmotif of the movie, The Book of Eli. Eli is the messenger of God, who carries the Logos in his “heart” and represents the last hope of mankind. As the movie opens mankind has engaged in what the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Elephant in the Room

There I was, quietly chuckling over Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson’s back and forth (and forth ) on the reasonableness of cryonics, when somebody decided to bring Derek Parfit into things . Says Julian: In reality, our ordinary way of talking about this leads to a serious mistake that Robin . . . . Continue Reading »

Demystification and Legend

Bryan Wandel has a good blog post here . Short, insightful, and well worth the read. One quibble however: Without accounting for the relationship between these two, Weber’s demystification (and ours) only regards the logical explanation of things, and not the participation and commitment that . . . . Continue Reading »

Politics without Politics

I was very privileged to be able to attend a lecture by Alasdair MacIntyre at Catholic University here in DC over the weekend. The topic was “Ends and Endings”, and the speech was a delightfully rambling overview of the connections between teleology and literature, ethics and . . . . Continue Reading »

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