Eagleton again, explaining the significance of the biblical idea of creation: “Because there is no necessity about the cosmos, we cannot deduce the laws which govern it from a priori principles, but need instead to look at how it actually works. This is the task of science. There . . . . Continue Reading »
A week ago, the First Things web site published a piece of mine on global warming. See it here: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2010/02/climate-of-skepticism . . . . Continue Reading »
Descartes aimed for an objective science, not the science of the scholastics. And that meant, especially, the deletion of final cause from science: “The entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing’s ‘end,’ I judge to be utterly useless in . . . . Continue Reading »
Bacon distinguishes three “grades of ambition in mankind.” First, there is the ambition to exert power over one’s native country, but this is a “vulgar and degenerate” ambition. More dignity is evident in “those who labor to extend the power of . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter’s review of Avatar is a must-read: Avatar isn’t much a movie: Instead, Cameron’s cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It’s not that the film’s politics make it bad, it’s that . . . . Continue Reading »
Ross is right to come down on Ezra for reckless and irresponsible hyperventilating on health care. But let me dot the i here. Ezra Klein kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy by accusing Lieberman of being “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to . . . . Continue Reading »
Rarely do Joe Carter and MAKE Magazine point me towards the same online curiosity . The intersection of topology and breakfast must have considerable ecumenical appeal. I’m going to turn Hart’s challenge around, however: now that you know how to create two interlocking bagel-halves by . . . . Continue Reading »
Steven Hayward ( Weekly Standard ) has a balanced and thorough analysis of the climate science emails made public a few weeks ago. Hayward is not a knee-jerk global warming skeptic. He begins the final paragraph of his piece with “Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there . . . . Continue Reading »
Longtime readers know of my obsession with mathematical beauty, so it should come as no surprise to find me hopping up and down most eagerly and pointing you towards Matthew Milliner’s very immodest proposal in Public Discourse. My only quibble with the article is that the proportion of . . . . Continue Reading »
Via Tyler Cowen, a paper by Davide Cantoni casts some doubt on the efficacy of the Protestant Ethic: Many theories, most famously Max Weber’s essay on the ‘Protestant ethic,’ have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their . . . . Continue Reading »
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