Month: May 2023

In Defense of Intolerance

Matthew Pianalto isn’t going to take it any more. Thanks to extremists like Scott Roeder, the anti-abortionist who murdered Dr George Tiller, and James von Brunn, the white supremacist who opened fire in the U.S. Holocaust Museum, as well as the various groups around the world who resort to terror bombings, we are likely to …

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Hegel’s God

Robert Wallace describes a little-known alternative divinity. In the debate about God that has been stirred up by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, writers regularly refer to certain famous philosophers. We hear about St Thomas Aquinas’s ‘five ways’ of proving God’s existence. Sometimes we hear about Benedict Spinoza’s unorthodox doctrine that …

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Masters, Slaves & Meanings

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) had a grand, overarching theory of how history unfolds. Roger Duncan looks at the nature of master-slave relationships in Hegel’s thought. Paul Tillich’s popular sixties classic The Courage To Be describes the spiritual quest of the West unfolding historically in three stages of ‘existential anxiety’. The first anxiety, he says, was about …

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Schopenhauer

Roger Caldwell looks at the most pessimistic of philosophers. If Leibniz, that great German figure of the Enlightenment, proclaimed that we live in the best of all possible worlds, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) held that we live in one of the worst – one permeated through and through by suffering and death. He became an atheist …

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Sapere Aude!

Anja Steinbauer introduces the life and ideas of Immanuel Kant, the merry sage of Königsberg, who died 200 years ago. “Have the courage to use your own reason!”, (in Latin sapere aude!) is the battle cry of the Enlightenment. It was articulated by Immanuel Kant in his famous article ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1784). Obstacles that …

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