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+7 +1
‘Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World,’ by Tim Whitmarsh
Whitmarsh argues that atheism isn’t a product of the modern age but reaches back to early Western intellectual tradition in the ancient Greek world.
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+23 +6
How political correctness rules in America's student 'safe spaces'
A student backlash against hearing words and ideas that oppose their own, citing emotional "trauma", is changing the culture of the American campus writes Ruth Sherlock, US Editor from Harvard University
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+29 +10
How and why exactly did consciousness become a problem?
For dualists, there was no 'problem' of consciousness – it was simply a separate realm of being. But the emergence of modern science came packaged with materialism, a philosophy that implicitly brought the soul back to earth. Scientists, however, were content ignoring subjectivity and focusing on the objective processes of material nature, until quantum physics made it clear that the mind plays a central role in bringing forth the world under investigation. How consciousness became a problem:
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+33 +10
Can Integrated Information Theory Explain Consciousness?
A radical new solution to the mind-body problem poses problems of its own. By John Horgan.
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+23 +4
Many God beliefs are empirically confirmable and refutable
Hegel said 'God does not offer himself up for observation'. Many of us seem to think that claims about gods, and other supernatural phenomena, are claims about what lie behind a sort of cosmic curtain or veil. On this side of the veil lies the empirically observable realm, the realm, we are told, that is the proper province of the empirical sciences. But there is a further realm beyond the veil - a realm of non-natural or supernatural beings and forces.
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+15 +6
Think about it: why budding philosophers shouldn't sit exams
Formal tests can’t measure complex ideas and creative thinking – so the University of Essex has ditched them altogether
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+25 +9
Wittgenstein, Schoolteacher
What the philosopher learned from his time in elementary-school classrooms. By Spencer Robins.
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+17 +8
bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness
“Feminism does not ground me. It is the discipline that comes from spiritual practice that is the foundation of my life.” By George Yancy and bell hooks. (Dec. 10)
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+22 +7
Consciousness Wars
The western esoteric tradition has been a victim of what we might call a “consciousness war,” which has been taking place over the last several centuries. By Gary Lachman.
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+21 +4
Can You Tell Mathematics from Poetry? Take the Quiz to Find out
"_______ is the ______ of logical ideas"—Albert Einstein. Do the words "mathematics" or "poetry" fill those blanks? (Nov. 30)
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+22 +4
Slow corruption
When a woman last year confessed that she would not know what to do if her fetus were diagnosed with Down’s syndrome, Richard Dawkins promptly replied: "Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice..." By Vidar Halgunset. (Dec. 7)
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+24 +5
When Einstein Met Tagore: A Remarkable Meeting of Minds on the Edge of Science and Spirituality
Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty at the intersection of science and spirituality.
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+8 +2
“People Will Be Terrible. Deal With It.”
I first encountered Kent Keith’s Paradoxical Commandments* when I was a high school freshman and I immediately loved them, got a hold of a poster with them on it, hung it on my wall so they would face me straight across the room whenever I was propped up on my bed facing forward, and read them countless times throughout high school.
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+23 +5
Buddhism Explained By Alan Watts
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+22 +7
When Philosophy Lost Its Way
The history of Western philosophy can be presented in a number of ways. It can be told in terms of periods — ancient, medieval and modern. We can divide it into rival traditions (empiricism versus rationalism, analytic versus Continental), or into various core areas (metaphysics, epistemology, ethics). It can also, of course, be viewed through the critical lens of gender or racial exclusion, as a discipline almost entirely fashioned for and by white European men.
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+6 +2
When Philosophy Lost Its Way
The institutionalization of philosophy made it into a discipline that could be seriously pursued only in an academic setting. This fact represents one of the enduring failures of contemporary philosophy.
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+19 +6
January 14th 1875 - Albert Schweitzer born
The theologian, musician, philosopher and Nobel Prize-winning physician Albert Schweitzer is born on this day in 1875 in Upper-Alsace, Germany (now Haut-Rhin, France).
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+20 +6
The Forgotten Founding Father Who Explains America's Political Dysfunction
Cato's life is the story of how, at the improbable height of crisis, a dream came true. And it is also the story of how the dream failed.
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+31 +7
People Put You in One of These Two Categories When They Meet You, Says Harvard Psychologist
Is this person a "lovable fool" or a "competent jerk?"
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+33 +8
Why humans find it hard to do away with religion
The new atheists decry religion as a poisonous set of lies. John Gray asks what if a belief in the supernatural is natural?
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