Sea of Faith - Soren Kierkegaard

Among the many theologians and religious philosophers that have become famous throughout history, the most interesting, enjoyable, thought-provoking and challenging has got to be the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (whose 200th birthday is being celebrated this week).

Wielding Hegel's dialectic method, Kierkegaard set out both to refute Hegel's conclusions, and to simultaneously defend and to problematize the question of faith and the meaning of life.

Apart from Socrates and Nietzsche (the former who invented the concept, the latter who gave it its most paradoxical twist), no other philosopher has epitomized the concept of irony quite so powerfully and masterfully as Kierkegaard.

His thought is sometimes difficult to pin down, partly due to the fact he wrote under a number of symbolic pseudonyms who expressed differing points of view (Johannes de Silentio, Hilarius Bookbinder, Constantin Constantius, Johannes Climacus: total porn nom de plum, by the way), and partly because the dialectic process he embraced is inherently dynamic and ever-changing. Just to give you a small taste of the incredible kind of balancing act he sought to perform, Kierkegaard argued against an increasingly secular public that faith is an immediacy higher than that afforded by reflection and the intelligibility of universal ethical categories. And arguing against maudlin conceptions of faith (all-too-common today), he contended that faith ought to be experienced in the shudder of existential fear and trembling. To strike this balance of a higher existence to be experienced in anguish, Kierkegaard explores the question of whether Abraham was justified in being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac in such a way that, whatever perspective you come from, you can't help both to admire Abraham and to be horrified by him.

But instead of letting me yap endlessly about this master of philosophy, here's a nice introduction to Kierkegaard and his thought, narrated by the influential non-realist (or anti-representationalist) philosopher of religion, Don Cupitt:

Happy birthday, Soren!

'Science' of the Gaps

If you're not familiar with the logical fallacy of the God of the gaps, here's roughly how it works: there is some phenomenon or process you can't explain (for whatever reason), but instead of being honest about your own lack of understanding, you simply jump to the conclusion that "God did it." In other words, you use God as the "explanation" for the gaps in our knowledge.

Three problems should be immediately obvious. First, you can't just make up an explanation out of thin air. Second, appealing to God doesn't actually explain anything. An explanation requires some sort of mechanism, a how. God may give you a who or a what, or maybe even a why, but definitely not a how, so appealing to God answers the wrong question. And third, as science continues to increase our understanding of the universe, the gaps that you fill in with 'God' gradually become smaller and smaller, and your own God becomes increasingly useless... that's not very pious of you now, is it?

But religion isn't the only attempt to fill in the gaps of our knowledge with made up facile crap. Pseudoscience tries to do exactly the same thing, but with the added perniciousness of pretending to be scientific and trying to capitalize on the intellectual respect that science has earned through centuries of rigorous and systematic research. And just like with cases of parents whose children die because they decided to pray for their children to heal from an ordinary disease instead of taking them to the doctor, pseudoscience can be just as dangerous for similar reasons.


Even without such consequences, however, the main problem with religion and pseudoscience is that they make people credulous and intellectually lazy, hoping for easy answers to solve complicated questions, thereby slowing down real intellectual progress.

In the philosophy of science, there's an important question regarding the line of demarcation between science and pseudoscience. It's a fascinating question, and one for which there is no easy solution, but here's a nice, useful shortcut: if a claim is unfalsifiable (not empirically testable), chances are it's vacuous crap...

Stephen Colbert - The Word: Medical Leave

As political philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in the past (as in this video and in this article from The Atlantic), when we turn from a market economy to a market society, we have taken a decidedly wrong turn... Instead of valuing people as persons with dignity and worthy of respect and consideration, with goals and projects that may have meaningful, intrinsic, emotional or educational value, we start to see everything (and everyone) around us through money-colored filters, and valuing them only in terms of their economic value: how much money they can contribute to our own financial goals or how much money they're going to cost us; and in the process we rob them of their personhood and humanity.

Stephen Colbert reports on some instances of this downward trend as it applies to hospitals and health-care providers...

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And what does it say about the insane cost of our healthcare system that deporting people overseas on a private plane is cheaper than just taking care of their injuries???

Viktor Frankl on Those Who Survived The Holocaust and Those Who Did Not

I just finished reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. I'm not sure anyone can read that book without getting knots in one's throat and/or getting teary-eyed...

The book isn't so much an account of events that took place during the Holocaust, but of the individual, subjective experiences of those who were sent to concentration camps, what they had to endure, what happened to their minds and bodies, and the life-or-death dilemmas they had to confront on a daily basis. This is an account written by a particularly thoughtful, honest and courageous psychologist who was able to interpret such experiences in light of larger issues about humanity in general.

The following is just one chilling example of the kind of insight and epiphany that makes this book one everyone ought to read:

On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return.

That quote just sends cold chills down my spine...

What Is Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox?

When I first introduce my students to the weirdness of philosophy and how even our most deeply-entrenched beliefs might be subject to serious questioning, I usually like to begin by posing to them Zeno's attempt to refute the idea that motion is possible (here's a fun little animation to get you started), and then continue to defend him against the objections raised by the students.

This has the dual benefit of being both a nice introduction to questioning dogmas and a nice exercise in critical thinking: since the students are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that Zeno is wrong, they concoct all kinds of arguments to refute him. The problem, of course, is that it's notoriously difficult to explain why exactly he's wrong, where he's made some kind of mistake.

Now, I get the idea of a limit in calculus, and I get the idea of the sum of a series as opposed to the sum of the individual members of a series, but I have noticed that we seem to have such an aversion to Zeno's conclusions that even professional philosophers and mathematicians tend to engage in a kind of prestidigitation in which they explain a mathematical method for solving the paradox that ends up being more smoke and mirrors than a genuine solution. The problem, and the following animation is an example of this, is that they tend to frame the paradox in a way that's question-begging, one in which they assume motion in order to prove motion.

In the following animation, it seems clear how you can refute Zeno once you grant him motion to the first halfway point, but for Zeno, he wasn't willing to concede actually having crossed that halfway point. For him, the challenge is that BEFORE you reach that halfway point, you must reach the halfway point of that halfway point, and before you can do that, you must reach that other halfway point, lather, rinse, repeat ad infinitum, and Zeno's conclusion is that you NEVER actually get to leave the starting point: you haven't gone anywhere.

As you can see, if you don't grant any motion at all to begin with, the above explanation, nice as it is, doesn't quite do the trick, does it?

When trying to refute someone, you should always ask how that person might respond to your objections, and if you're charitable, right or wrong, that will give you a better sense of the real strength of your own arguments. When it comes to Zeno, I tend to think that if you were to explain to him the asymptotic concept of a limit in calculus, he could just apply his paradox to that and be right back in business with his own paradox, now fortified with steroids...

Laura Snyder - The Philosophical Breakfast Club

When we think about scientists, and especially the birth of science, our minds usually go straight to Galileo, Descartes, Kepler and Newton, and then to folks like Michael Faraday, Joseph Priestly, Antoine Lavoisier, Lord Kelvin, Darwin, etc. Or maybe for some of you it goes all the way back to Thales, Democritus, Empedocles and Aristotle...

What most people don't know, however, is that none of these people called themselves 'scientists.' The term was only invented by the philosopher/scientist William Whewell during Darwin's lifetime to demarcate the work of experimental 'natural philosophers' and naturalists from that of 'philosophers' more broadly construed. Whewell came up with the word 'scientits' as the equivalent of 'artists' to separate those philosophers who worked according to inductive reasoning based on observation and experimentation from those that engaged in reasoning from first principles.

But Whewell wasn't content with simply assigning a different name to these experimental philosophers. Along with his friends Charles Babbage (inventor of the difference and analytic engines, and mentor to Ada Lovelace, the enchantress of numbers), John Herschel and Richard Jones, Whewell wanted to change the very nature of what science is, how it works and what purposes it strives to achieve. In the following TEDTalk, historian Laura Snyder (and I'm guessing by her tone, former museum tour-guide) tells the story of this fascinating scientific revolution, about which you can also read in her book The Philosophical Breakfast Club.

If you ever get a chance, you ought to read up on John Stuart Mill and William Whewell's battle to determine the precise nature of inductive reasoning, and how Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection got caught up right in the middle of it...

Monty Python - The Argument Clinic

If you've ever met or seen philosophers in action, you've probably noticed a couple of things: they're wicked smart, they're incredibly nit-picky about defining their terms (and getting others to do the same), and they love to argue.

I can see why many people would find these traits off-putting—in fact, that's kind of why the Athenians sentenced Socrates to death!— but I also hope you can see why they're important, so I thought I'd share a couple of examples.

In the first clip, we have the famous Argument Clinic skit from Monty Python, in which a fundamental disagreement about just what exactly an argument is (in the technical sense: a collection of statements connected to establish a definite proposition) leads to another sense of an argument (the one understood more colloquially: a quarrel, or mere contradiction between disagreeing parties).

And, thanks to former President George W. Bush, here is a great and hilarious example of what can happen when you don't define your terms clearly:

Looks like the choice is yours: would you rather be thought nit-picky or an absolute idiot? ;)

Ken Jennings - Watson, Jeopardy and Me

During the industrial revolution, much of the manual labor that had hitherto been done by people was suddenly taken over by machines, who were faster, more accurate, cheaper, and didn't complain about safe working conditions, fair wages, paid sick days, maternity leave, holiday pay and so on, so they replaced people, who ended up losing their jobs.

Well, that's physical labor, we laughed, and thought that machines could never replace our raw brain power: we know how to think, how to reason, how to solve problems, how to calculate and compute, etc. Well, guess what? As Watson, the powerful IBM supercomputer proved a couple of years ago, you might not want to feel so confident that you have job security just because your job requires mental power... the machines are coming, and unlike the terminator who was shooting for John and Sarah Connor, these machines are shooting for your job!

In the following TEDTalks presentation, Ken Jennings, all-star Jeopardy champion, tells the story of his experience of being the best Jeopardy player of all time and getting beaten by a computer, and reflects on what this might mean for the future of humanity.

How long until your job is taken over by a computer?

Pat Robertson - Want Miracles? Be Simple-Minded, Credulous and Uneducated

In a strange case similar to that of Benjamin Button, it seems as though Pat Robertson's senility is firmly advancing in the direction of reason, to the point that I've been wondering lately whether he's becoming one of the most interesting exponents of religious nonsense and an unexpected advocate for secularism. Well, either that or he's so far gone the deep end that he's not even trying to be ironic... Here's a case in point:

Ah, those simple, primitive people... they'll believe any nonsense you tell them :)

Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

If you believe in reincarnation, you could reasonably believe that Kurt Vonnegut was the reincarnated soul of Mark Twain. With their brief and minimalist styles, as well as their no-holes-barred aphorisms, these two authors managed to drive American literature to a place where substance could take a front seat in our collective consciousness in a way that's rarely accessible through other authors. In the process, they got us to question many of the sacred cows we usually take for granted. In the following reading of an excerpt from Breakfast of Champions, we get to see Vonnegut touch, in his uniquely hilarious way, on the American experience of racism, capitalism, free will, family values, patriotism, religion, parenthood and personhood. Best of all, we get to see that he was so funny he could make himself crack up :)

How awesome was that? :)