Group items tagged

"Traditionally, faith and reason have each been considered to be sources of justification for religious belief. Because both can purportedly serve this same epistemic function, it has been a matter of much interest to philosophers and theologians how the two are related and thus how the rational agent should treat claims derived from either source. Some have held that there can be no conflict between the two-that reason properly employed and faith properly understood will never produce contradictory or competing claims-whereas others have maintained that faith and reason can (or even must) be in genuine contention over certain propositions or methodologies. Those who have taken the latter view disagree as to whether faith or reason ought to prevail when the two are in conflict. Kierkegaard, for instance, prioritizes faith even to the point that it becomes positively irrational, while Locke emphasizes the reasonableness of faith to such an extent that a religious doctrine's irrationality-conflict with itself or with known facts-is a sign that it is unsound. Other thinkers have theorized that faith and reason each govern their own separate domains, such that cases of apparent conflict are resolved on the side of faith when the claim in question is, say, a religious or theological claim, but resolved on the side of reason when the disputed claim is, for example, empirical or logical. Some relatively recent philosophers, most notably the logical positivists, have denied that there is a domain of thought or human existence rightly governed by faith, asserting instead that all meaningful statements and ideas are accessible to thorough rational examination. This has presented a challenge to religious thinkers to explain how an admittedly nonrational or transrational form of language can hold meaningful cognitive content."

"Right-wing political forces in Japan, encouraged by the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, are waging a campaign of intimidation to deny the disgraceful chapter in World War II when the Japanese military forced thousands of women to serve in wartime brothels. Many mainstream Japanese scholars and most non-Japanese researchers have established as historical fact that the program allowed Japanese soldiers to sexually abuse women across the Asian warfront - based on widespread testimony from the "comfort women." Now a political effort to treat these events as wholesale lies concocted by Japan's wartime enemies is gaining traction, with revisionists trying to roll back the government's 1993 apology for the coercion of women into prostitution. The Abe government, intent on stoking nationalistic fervor, was rebuffed earlier this year in its effort to have revisions made to a 1996 United Nations human rights report on the women Japan forced into sex slavery. But, at home, the right wing continues to hammer away at The Asahi Shimbun newspaper, seizing on the paper's retractions of articles published in the 1980s and 1990s that turned on limited aspects of its coverage to deny the larger historical truth of the "comfort women" program."

"Keep practicing, and you might become an expert. Or maybe you won't. Who knows? Not the experts, suggests a raging debate. Made famous by Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, the 2008 book's "10,000-hour rule"-the number of  hours of practice needed to acquire mastery of a skill-looks increasingly beleaguered. Underlying arguments over whether winners are made or born, or over nature versus nurture, the disagreement points to deep uncertainty about who should receive expert instruction and how best to teach people to excel. "No one disputes that practice is important," says psychologist David Zachary Hambrick of Michigan State University in East Lansing. "Through practice, people get better. The question is whether that is all there is to it.""

This is the article for the Typhoon Day lesson

"This month, the Guardian launched a campaign in conjunction with Change.org (the petition is here) to end "female genital mutilation" (FGM) in the UK-see Dominic Wilkinson's recent analysis on this blog. I support this campaign and I believe that FGM is impermissible. Indeed, I think that all children, whether male, female, or intersex, should be protected from having parts of their genitals removed unless there is a pressing medical indication; I think this is so regardless of the cultural or religious affiliations of the child's parents; and I have given some arguments for this view here, here, here, here, and here. But note that some commentators are loath to accept so broadly applied an ethical principle: to discuss FGM in the same breath as male circumcision, they think, is to "trivialize" the former and to cause all manner of moral confusion."

"Autism is a poorly-understood neurological disorder that can impair an individual's ability to engage in various social interactions. But little 5-year-old Iris Grace in the UK is an excellent example of the unexpected gifts that autism can also grant - her exceptional focus and attention to detail have helped her create incredibly beautiful paintings that many of her fans (and buyers) have likened to Monet's works. Little Iris is slowly learning to speak, whereas most children have already begun to speak at least a few words by age 2. Along with speech therapy, her parents gradually introduced her to painting, which is when they discovered her amazing talent."

"There is no "but" about what happened at Charlie Hebdo yesterday. Some people published some cartoons, and some other people killed them for it.  Words and pictures can be beautiful or vile, pleasing or enraging, inspiring or offensive; but they exist on a different plane from physical violence, whether you want to call that plane spirit or imagination or culture, and to meet them with violence is an offense against the spirit and imagination and culture that distinguish humans. Nothing mitigates this monstrosity. There will be time to analyze why the killers did it, time to parse their backgrounds, their ideologies, their beliefs, time for sociologists and psychologists to add to understanding. There will be explanations, and the explanations will be important, but explanations aren't the same as excuses. Words don't kill, they must not be met by killing, and they will not make the killers' culpability go away."

"The guiding idea behind formalism is that mathematics is not a body of propositions representing an abstract sector of reality but is much more akin to a game, bringing with it no more commitment to an ontology of objects or properties than ludo or chess. This idea has some intuitive plausibility: consider the tyro toiling at multiplication tables or the student using a standard algorithm for differentiating or integrating a function. It also corresponds to some aspects of the practice of advanced mathematicians in some periods-for example, the treatment of imaginary numbers for some time after Bombelli's introduction of them, and perhaps the attitude of some contemporary mathematicians towards the higher flights of set theory. Finally, it is often the position to which philosophically naïve respondents will gesture towards, when pestered by questions as to the nature of mathematics."

"The premise here is that if brains somehow sustain the mind and we deconstruct the brain in detail and we put the information back together in powerful computers, we should be able to recreate consciousness from computer code. Or such is the hope, anyway. Since the brain integrates external stimuli to give us our experience of reality, would simulated brains be able to recreate reality? And if so, could we be fooled by a simulation, unable to distinguish reality and fantasy?"

"Contemporary philosophical discussions of the imagination have been primarily focused on three sets of topics. Work in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology has explored a cluster of issues concerning the phenomenology and cognitive architecture of imagination, examining the ways that imagination differs from and resembles other mental states both phenomenologically and functionally, and investigating the roles that imagination may play in the understanding of self and others, and in the representation of past, future and counterfactual scenarios. Work in aesthetics has focused on issues related to imaginative engagement with fictional characters and events, identifying and offering resolutions to a number of (apparent) paradoxes. And work in modal epistemology has focused on the extent to which imaginability-and its cousin conceivability-can serve as guides to possibility."

"Since 2009, the Gallup polling firm has surveyed people in 150 countries and territories on, among other things, their daily emotional experience. Their survey asks five questions, meant to gauge whether the respondent felt significant positive or negative emotions the day prior to the survey. The more times that people answer "yes" to questions such as "Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?", the more emotional they're deemed to be."

It's easy for us to ridicule the foolishness of people in the past who believed things that turned out to be absurdly false. We are horrified that the Aztecs would make human sacrifices to appease a volcano god. We laugh that people were afraid Columbus would sail off the edge of the earth. We are amazed that the people of Salem, Massachusetts would hang people for being witches and we are shocked that religious authorities would burn Giordano Bruno at the stake for teaching that the earth went around the sun. And we are particularly appalled by the hatred of the Nazis that enabled Hitler to murder millions.

In the last few years, it's become increasingly clear that food companies engineer hyperprocessed foods in ways precisely geared to most appeal to our tastes. This technologically advanced engineering is done, of course, with the goal of maximizing profits, regardless of the effects of the resulting foods on consumer health, natural resources, the environment or anything else. But the issues go way beyond food, as the City University of New York professor Nicholas Freudenberg discusses in his new book, "Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health." Freudenberg's case is that the food industry is but one example of the threat to public health posed by what he calls "the corporate consumption complex," an alliance of corporations, banks, marketers and others that essentially promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles.

"The Enduring Voices team is pleased to present these Talking Dictionaries, giving listeners around the world a chance to hear some of the most little-known sounds of human speech. Several communities are now offering the online record of their language to be shared by any interested person around the world. While you probably won't walk away from these Talking Dictionaries knowing how to speak a new language, you will encounter fascinating and beautiful sounds--forms of human speech you've never heard before--and through them, get a further glimpse into the rich diversity of culture and experience that humans have created in every part of the globe. "

"On July 29, Mr. Christie's lawyer will argue in Hawaii federal court that his client should be allowed to present a religious-freedom defense at the eventual criminal trial. He will base his argument on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress in 1993, which requires the government to show a "compelling interest" whenever it "substantially burdens" a religious practice. In 2006, the Supreme Court relied on the act to permit a New Mexico church to use the hallucinogen hoasca, or ayahuasca, for sacramental purposes."

"Hamilton was no militant atheist. He was not contemptuous of faith or of the faithful-far from it; he was a longtime churchgoer-and he was therefore, I think, all the more a threat to unreflective Christianity. At heart, he was questioning whether the Christian tradition of encouraging a temporal moral life required belief in a divine order. Could someone, in other words, live by the ethical teachings of Jesus while rejecting the existence of a creator and redeemer God? The questions with which he grappled were eternal, essential, and are with us still: how does a culture that tends to be religious continue to hold to a belief in an all-powerful, all-loving divinity beyond time and space given the evidence of science and of experience?"

" Why do people believe in God? What is our evidence that there is an invisible agent who has a real impact on our lives? How can those people be so confident? Enlarge This Image T. M. Luhrmann Connect With Us on Twitter For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT. Readers' Comments "Pascal's wager is not complete without the assumption of punishment for non-believers: torment and everlasting fire. Let's not forget that the fear of hell is essential to the process of indoctrination." Tom, Boston Read Full Comment » These are the questions that university-educated liberals ask about faith. They are deep questions. But they are also abstract and intellectual. They are philosophical questions. In an evangelical church, the questions would probably have circled around how to feel God's love and how to be more aware of God's presence. Those are fundamentally practical questions"

"The long-held theory helped to explain a part of the hearing process called "adaptation," or how humans can hear everything from the drop of a pin to a jet engine blast with high acuity, without pain or damage to the ear. Its overturning could have significant impact on future research for treating hearing loss, said Anthony Ricci, PhD, the Edward C. and Amy H. Sewall Professor of Otolaryngology and senior author of the study."

Intuition. Originally an alleged direct relation, analogous to visual seeing, between the mind and something abstract and so not accessible to the senses. What are intuited (which can be derivatively called 'intuitions') may be abstract objects, like numbers or properties, or certain truths regarded as not accessible to investigation through the senses or calculation; the mere short-circuiting of such processes in 'bank managers intuition' would not count as intuition for philosophy.