Gordon Marino explains how we talk ourselves out of doing the right thing. There is a strong movement afoot calling for more ethics classes, workshops and review boards. The presumption is that our citizenry is in dire need of more knowledge of ethics, and more practice in the art of analysis. While all this may …
Stop Kidding Yourself: Kierkegaard on Self-Deception Read More »
Peter Caws considers how much is lost in translation. There’s a story about an American evangelist who was challenged about something in his preaching that didn’t agree with the Greek of the New Testament. He is supposed to have replied “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me.” Very funny, …
Mathias Brochhausen envisages Wittgenstein Hitchhiking around the Galaxy. There are probably many people who have had the following experience in recent years: When confronted with the question of the meaning of life, the number forty-two automatically and almost compulsively crosses their minds – only to be banished in favour of a long and elaborate answer …
Don’t Panic! It’s the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Read More »
Kile Jones explains the differences between these ways of thinking. Shakespeare never met Wittgenstein, Russell, or Ryle, and one wonders what a conversation between them would have been like. “What’s in a name, you ask?” Wittgenstein might answer “A riddle of symbols.” Russell might respond “An explanation of concepts,” and Ryle might retort “Many unneeded …
Patrick Cox tells us why Zen has to use words to get beyond words. In Zen Buddhism, one often finds ‘explanation’ spoken about in a negative manner. But in writing on Zen, one necessarily explains; explaining something is often the only purpose of an article or book. Can Zen and explanation be reconciled? What about …
Would My Zen Master Fail Me For Writing This Article? Read More »
Russell Berg has fifteen criteria for scientificness and he knows how to use them. The ‘scientific method’ is a group of methods and procedures. But since Thomas Kuhn argued in the 1960s that the concept of ‘falsification’ formulated by Karl Popper is insufficient on its own to determine the scientificness of an idea, there has …
Ian James Kidd introduces an iconic iconoclast of the philosophy of science. Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) was not a conventional philosopher – a fact he delighted in and took great care to maintain. He trained as an opera singer and a physicist, and only came to philosophy by accident, as he freely admitted. He disliked academia …
At the end of the 20th century humankind has developed a new understanding of its interrelatedness in all aspects of life. The economic basis of international integration is the world market. The socio-political aspects of the consolidation process involve the expansion of democracy everywhere in the world. Democracy is becoming a prerequisite for the implementation …
Harvard philosopher Tu Wei-ming is the most famous advocate of the Confucian tradition outside China. Anja Steinbauer talked to him in Boston. Professor Tu, could you give our readers an idea of where your philosophical interests lie? When I first came to the States to study philosophy in 1962, to my great surprise, at the …
Edward Ingram explains the West’s debt to the Islamic philosophers. Europe in the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire was not a happy place to be – at least for scholars. For the most part, the aristocracy, including kings, were illiterate and, to all intents and purposes, innumerate – applied mathematics in the …