For much of the last century, "experience" has been a central category in the philosophy of religion. Rather than treating religious beliefs as attitudes toward propositions ("God created the world in seven days, yes of no"), experientialist approaches understand religion as an . . . . Continue Reading »
David Deutsch, controversial quantum physicist extraordinaire, lays into modern science in a big way (H/t: WGL3): I don’t know. I suspect it is related to a more general anti-rational phenomenon that was present in nearly all 20th-century philosophies, especially logical positivism, and . . . . Continue Reading »
A re-assessment of conservatism is an inevitable topic of discussion, and certainly a worthy task. But I confess the topic wearies me – not only because I’m old enough to have seen a number of earlier iterations, but more, I think, because I’m less and less convinced . . . . Continue Reading »
Apropos of the perennial Locke-run-amok conversation, consider Noah Berlatsky’s piece at the main site : the American spirit galumphs and galerks through every one of the Doctor’s works. Like his fellow citizens, Seuss is boisterous, hearty, optimistic, profligate in invention, and not . . . . Continue Reading »
Without kicking open too big a can of worms, consider this line from Andrew , brought to my attention by John : McCain is a warrior; Ron Paul is a conservative of non-violence. At some deep philosophical level, this is the dividing line between Oakeshott and Strauss, as well. I’m no follower . . . . Continue Reading »
“Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken. The two forms are inseparable. It is impossible to live at peace withthose whom we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either reclaim or torment . . . . Continue Reading »
"At the time and in the country in which the present study was written, it was granted by everyone except backward people that the Jewish faith had not been refuted by science or by history . . . . [O]ne could grant to science and history everything they seem to teach . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s impossible to ignore all the signposts of the Christmas season—wherever you go the sights and sounds are unambiguously evocative of the holiday season. Still, sometimes as powerful as the familiar Christmas imagery is the impulse to secularize the holiday—to pull . . . . Continue Reading »
Contributing to a festschrift devoted to George Carey, our own Peter Lawler reflects on the American founding and the complicated set of sometimes inconsistent principles that is our intellectual inheritance. If it turns out that there is no univocal theory that can decisively be articulated as . . . . Continue Reading »
Our own Peter Lawler is the James Brown of the blogosphere, the hardest working man in the business. Over at the the Encyclopedia Britannica blog , he argues that a "postmodernism, rightly understood" is essentially a realism that counters our modern tendency towards . . . . Continue Reading »
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