Philip Badger tries to convince us to be optimistic about human equality. One shared ambition of philosophy and social science has been to understand the origins of conflict in human society. The evidence from social psychology is mixed, with some studies suggesting that conflict can be reduced by the establishment of shared goals (Muzafer Sherif, …
James P. Sterba thinks libertarianism implies a right to welfare. What is a just society? In seeking a defensible conception of justice, it behooves us to start with the assumptions of the libertarian perspective, the view that appears to endorse the least enforcement of morality. I propose to show that this libertarian view, contrary to …
Shawn Harte on a fleeting dream. “Everything subject to origination is subject also to dissolution,” warns the Buddha, insightfully foreshadowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the ineluctable tendency of a system towards disorder) in a way whose simplicity would impress even a modern physicist. This law of anitya, or ‘impermanence’, proclaims that all contingent existence …
A Buddhistic Contemplation of Impermanence from Death Row Read More »
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 …
Frederick Ochieng’-Odhiambo tells us why truth is sometimes sacrificed to law. The relationship between law and justice, or between legality and morality, is of much interest within philosophy in general, and philosophy of law in particular. This article discusses the two with respect to the duties of defense attorneys. Some people tend to be leery …
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 …
Emrys Westacott asks a probing question. Imagine that right after briefing Adam about which fruit was allowed and which forbidden, God had installed a closed-circuit television camera in the garden of Eden, trained on the tree of knowledge. Think how this might have changed things for the better. The serpent sidles up to Eve and …
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 …
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 …
Peter Rickman says you’re not the only one. A competitor on a BBC quiz show thought that Immanuel Kant was a football player. As a layman he can be forgiven; even if philosophy were more widely taught in schools, it would probably not include Kant for kids. It is harder to forgive those who teach …