Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
We often hear neo-liberals defending the implementation of so-called globalization policies on the basis of the miraculous improvement in people’s income they have allegedly brought over the last 20 or so years. A new study tells a slightly more nuanced story…
A new friendship always brings with it the prospect of serious and unpredictable change, and there is no guarantee that the change it brings will take the form of moral improvement.
Camus was no existentialist. And later in life, no particular friend of Sartre (and vice versa).
Muslim protesters in Thatcher-era Bradford were not always able to incinerate copies of The Satanic Verses, because (as the novelist Ray Bradbury had told us) the temperature at which books burn is Fahrenheit 451. The human body burns at Fahrenheit 1,500.
Does the philosophical profession have a bias against women? Here is a different point of view.
Does terrorism work? It’s complicated, argues a new book reviewed in the Guardian. “Perhaps most depressing are the testimonies of those who kill, maim and destroy to feel a twisted sense of celebrity or power. One Republican boasts there was no shortage of women “prepared to give more than the time of day” to terrorists. A second talks of “great comradeship”. A third simply says: “I felt important.””
The incredible power that simple silence has on our brain.
A philosophical analysis of the Trump-Clinton contrast, with Trump on the side of Nazi sympathizer Carl Schmitt and Clinton more akin to the dissenting Hannah Arendt.
The Schopenhauer dilemma and midlife crises. The trick is to reorient your priorities from telic to atelic activities…
The timelessness of H.L. Mencken, critic, journalist.
However much we would like it to be otherwise, it’s easier to change language than to change thought.
Neither theism nor atheism: G* might exist, and it likely doesn’t give a crap about you.
Footnotes to Plato 
Isn’t AP just what we used to call Deism?
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Robin, yes, but with actual arguments. Also, deism implies a creator, but not necessarily a plan, like AP does. I haven’t read the book, but the review makes it sound intriguing, if nothing else to give headaches to both theists and atheists.
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Hi Massimo,
I’ve not read the book either, but from the review: “Next, he enlists a cluster of classic theistic arguments — cosmological, teleological, mystical, ontological — to support the conclusion that there is cosmic purpose”
So if all he is doing is warming over the “classic” arguments that atheists have heard and refuted many times, then it’s unlikely to give many atheists headaches.
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Coel, except that atheists arguments have never been knock down ones — despite the fact that on balance I do think they carry the day.
Why don’t you give the book a try, just as an exercise in self-imposed flexible thinking?
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Hi Massimo,
> Why don’t you give the book a try, just as an exercise in self-imposed flexible thinking?
Because time is a precious resource, and there’s nothing in the review to suggest that these arguments are any more persuasive than usual. The contribution of this book seems to me to be to accept these arguments and channel the conclusions in new directions. That’s a valuable contribution to the space of possibilities, certainly, but not really worth wasting time on if for those who don’t find these familiar arguments to be even mildly persuasive in the first place.
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Lol. I love people who assume they are so much busier than everyone else.
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I agree with Coel and DM of course, though one issue that comes up here, is that we naturalists do not yet seem to have a reasonably complete, and reasonably accepted, account to provide of our own. If anyone cares to, please explain “purpose” from our perspective. Do we yet have a single overriding answer from which to help rid humanity of its countless seemingly idiotic notions?
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Hi Dan,
> Lol. I love people who assume they are so much busier than everyone else.
You often seem to interpret things in the worst possible way.
Nowhere did I suggest that I was busier than anyone else. I’m just saying that every activity has an opportunity cost and so every person has to make judgements about what is worth their time and what isn’t. For those who reject the familiar arguments in support of purpose in the universe, there isn’t (on the face of it) much to be gained from reading a book predicated on those arguments and so it is reasonable to conclude that time is better spent elsewhere.
Of course if you want to read the book anyway, that’s perfectly fine too!
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Hi Massimo,
Well they wouldn’t be. Just as the non-existence of faeries and unicorns is not arrived at from knock-down arguments for their non-existence, it’s arrived at from the lack of any evidence for them (plus Occam).
I have never come across a single argument supposedly for the existence of a deity that doesn’t actually work better as an argument against deities; all the classic arguments are hopeless special pleading.
For the reason DM gave. But don’t worry, if there ever is a good argument for gods (or purpose at the core of the universe or whatever) we can be sure that we’ll get to hear of it sooner or later, and likely sooner.
Hi Dan,
Don’t worry, we’re not recommending that others read the book either! 🙂
Hi Eric,
It’s explained as a product of Darwinian evolution. Things that search for food survive and reproduce better; therefore evolution leads to things that search for food. Hence “purpose”.
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DM: You made exactly the same “opportunity costs” arguments about why you shouldn’t bother reading Kant and other equally important figures from the history of philosophy back on Scientia. I found it as funny then as I do now.
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Lol. I love people who assume they are so much busier than everyone else
Dan: I’m still reading Ulysses.
Everybody is busier than everybody else, just like all auto insurance companies are cheaper than all the others 🙂
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The Incredible Story of Developing Country Income Growth: Was it Just China?
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Seachris’s book (and Mulgan’s review) offer much food for thought. However, until we can define some purpose common to both human culture and the rest of the earth’s biota, it seems senseless to try to apply such a purpose to the universe as a whole. Our own culture is a distinctly human invention, probably emerging coeval with the beginning of language, and differing in complexity and capacity for abstraction, but not perhaps in kind, from survival strategies devised by other creatures, such as bowerbirds and bees. As such, it certainly has a purpose, but one that may be better explained by market forces or chaos theory than by either theology or material science.
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I love when people dream that they can give headaches to atheists in such a way. Even knock down evidence in favour of BT wouldn’t give headaches to atheists it would just make them believe in BT and that would be the end of it. They wouldn’t be atheists with headaches they’d be theists now. What would remain the same is the influence that evidence has in the formation of their beliefs.
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Garth, you have a rather epistemically optimistic view of atheists. Many of them, in my experience, are no more rational (or irrational) agents than many theists. So no, they would develop a headache way before converting to BT.
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As for “purpose” it is a human construct so it’s hard to imagine it existing with no relevance or meaning to the humans who constructed it,
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Massimo, you are an atheist. So are you riddled with headaches over it or are you a special kind of atheist?
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Garth, as often, you missed my point. And your own. You wrote that not even knockdown arguments would give atheists a headache, so you were clearly talking about a hypothetical.
At any rate, a number of atheists have such a superficial understanding of the arguments (likely, because they got it from Dawkins, or worse), that they are hardly better than the religionists they feel so smugly superior to.
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Well a ‘god or gods’ that is not good [a] is more plausible than a good one! But still absurd
An excuse to post a link to my story ‘The Story of Eddy Puss’ staring Durga the creator:
https://skepticalsciencereviews.wordpress.com/story-land/
There are still typos. When I think I got ’em all,I look again and find more …
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Massimo,
“Garth, as often, you missed my point. And your own.”
As often I disagree with you about that. I don’t think i missed any point.
“At any rate, a number of atheists have such a superficial understanding of the arguments (likely, because they got it from Dawkins, or worse), that they are hardly better than the religionists they feel so smugly superior to.”
This is clearly your opinion, but I’m not seeing any support for it. Just assertion. As such we’ll have to agree to disagree. I think most atheists, even you, are far more rational than most theists.
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Have you personally investigated the logic of absurdism philosophy? If so I’d like to know something about it, thanks.
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It does seem to rearrange the gears in the box, rather than look outside of it.
For instance, we are finite beings. What would an infinite being be? Aren’t limitation and definition essentially the same, both expressions of form?
If there was being without form, wouldn’t it be more nebulous, than super-human?
As I try to point out, an absolute would be a state of raw essence, in that it would lack any distinction. A spiritual absolute would be the source from which we rise, not an ideal of intelligence and judgment, the talents of our mental processing, from which we fell.
We try to find ideals that are absolute and keep coming up empty. Maybe the problem is with our logic, not the universe.
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I told Massimo AP is old-fashioned Epicureanism.
Of course Camus is no existentialist; he’s an absurdist. That goes beyond what the author of the piece said. Sartre deserved the opprobrium. And he dropped many friends, not just Camus, like flies. I think he was also jealous Camus got the Nobel first.
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I’ve read several of Massimo’s other links via David Rieff on Twitter. (He’s a good follow.)
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I’m being a newspaper editor with a broken arm (hence my ‘not Epictetus’ comments a couple of weeks ago) if we want to talk busyness.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flies
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Minding,
No, I’ve never seriously investigated absurdism. Where you referring to a particular version, like Camus’?
Garth,
No, sorry, you did miss the point entirely in your response, though it is rather typical of you to ignore when someone shows you something you got wrong, pretend you were responding to something else, or simply state that you are right anyway.
As for evidence, you are kidding, right? (No, I’m kidding, I know you aren’t.) I said “a number of atheists” not “most atheists.” And since I have direct observation of what I said, no, we are not going to agree to disagree. You are just plain, empirically, wrong.
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Massimo,
“No, sorry, you did miss the point entirely in your response”
No sorry I didn’t. But it is typical of you to insist that I missed a point I did not miss.
“I said “a number of atheists” not “most atheists.””
Actually in your initial comment to me you said “many atheists.”
“And since I have direct observation of what I said, no, we are not going to agree to disagree. You are just plain, empirically, wrong.”
You might have evidence but you didn’t present any of it. You just asserted. So until I see some evidence, based on my observation, you are the one who is just plain, empirically wrong. But surely you can agree that we do in fact disagree. It would seem silly to claim otherwise.
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Massimo
BTW if you want evidence you can refer to all of the interviews with Richard Dawkins on the subject. Dawkins has been asked many many times what it would take for him to believe in God, or how he would react to credible evidence for God. His answer is always the same. If he were presented credible evidence for God he would then believe in God. He never mentions any headaches over it. Is it your position that he would continue to disbelieve in the face of credible evidence for God because he is no different that the religious in that his disbelief in God is faith based?
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Does Philosophy Have a Woman Problem?
LECTURES AND FRAGMENTS BY MUSONIUS RUFUS
Seneca; Rufus, Musonius; Hierocles; Aurelius, Marcus; Laërtius, Diogenes. Stoic Six Pack 2 – Consolations From A Stoic, On The Shortness of Life, Musonius Rufus, Hierocles, Meditations In Verse and The Stoics (Illustrated) (p. 96). . Kindle Edition.
Lecture III That Women Too Should Study Philosophy When someone asked him if women too should study philosophy, he began to discourse on the theme that they should, in somewhat the following manner. Women as well as men, he said, have received from the gods the gift of reason, which we use in our dealings with one another and by which we judge whether a thing is good or bad, right or wrong. Likewise the female has the same senses as the male; namely sight, hearing, smell, and the others. Also both have the same parts of the body, and one has nothing more than the other. Moreover, not men alone, but women too, have a natural inclination toward virtue and the capacity for acquiring it, and it is the nature of women no less than men to be pleased by good and just acts and to reject the opposite of these. If this is
Seneca; Rufus, Musonius; Hierocles; Aurelius, Marcus; Laërtius, Diogenes. Stoic Six Pack 2 – Consolations From A Stoic, On The Shortness of Life, Musonius Rufus, Hierocles, Meditations In Verse and The Stoics (Illustrated) (p. 100). . Kindle Edition.
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