By Daniel Tippens Please note that the ideas presented below are things that the author feels strongly on, but on which he hasn’t fully formed an opinion or argument. This is meant to be the start of a conversation, not the end of one. We often portray our moral heroes with photographs such as the one accompanying this post. They […]
by David Ottlinger “The problem of evil, in the sense in which I am using this phrase, is essentially a logical problem: it sets the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling the several beliefs which he holds. It is not a scientific problem that might be solved by further discoveries…” [1] -JL Mackie, The Miracle of […]
by Steve Snyder Baseball has long been regarded as being as American as “hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet,” per a jingle from that carmaker. Especially in days past, it’s been seen as a harbinger of cultural changes, such as integration with Jackie Robinson. (That’s even though pro football beat baseball to the punch.) From Robinson, baseball went on to […]
By: Daniel Tippens When I was a teenager, I regularly attended church, I was actively engaged in the youth group, and even played the drums in the church band. One thing that I was taught and took as unquestionable moral dogma was that having certain thoughts was morally bad, simply by virtue of having them. It wasn’t just that acting […]
By Michael Boyle In light of Dan Kaufman’s recent essay on the humanities, I’d like to sketch out an example of one kind of response, in one small humanities course, to some of the problems that he has identified. Not coincidentally, we are friends and colleagues, teaching in the same department, and so his concerns regarding the challenges facing humanities […]
By Daniel A. Kaufman With the exception, perhaps, of those who teach at our most elite universities and liberal arts colleges, it should be apparent to everyone in the higher education business that the humanities and liberal arts are in trouble. Deteriorating numbers and declining esteem tell the story of subjects that are increasingly perceived as being largely useless to […]
By Daniel Tippens Some notes on attention and sensory penetration I intend to argue that vision is informationally encapsulated (just “encapsulated” from here on out) from flavor. In the last post, we discussed the ideas of encapsulation and sensory penetration. The notion of encapsulation that I am working with takes place at the level of experience, and sensory penetration takes […]
By: Daniel Tippens Introduction Let’s understand our sensory systems in a common sense way to refer to the 5 senses we are familiar with: vision, touch, audition, and so on. A sensory system, understood in this paper, is characterized by certain sense organs, specific brain-areas dedicated to processing the information that those sense organs receive, and a certain kind of […]
By David Ottlinger Philosophy, it would seem, has fallen on hard times. Or at least it is often said that philosophy has fallen on hard times. To philosophers themselves, philosophy has just completed an eventful century. And in spite of rumors one occasionally hears to the contrary, philosophers are in no way worried about the subject drying up or having […]
By Mark English In an aside in a recent piece on moral intuitionism, Daniel Kaufman remarked that he was unsure whether “there really are such things as moral obligations and duties.” [1]. I think I understand what he is getting at here, but rather than trying directly to address his question, I want to sketch out – very briefly and […]
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