May 15, 2008
Little Green Men
The genetically engineered humans are here! The genetically engineered humans are here!
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May 15, 2008
The Neural Buddhists
The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.
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May 14, 2008
The Intellectual Catwalk
The world's top public intellectuals are on the campaign trail again. It's time to cast a vote.
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May 14, 2008
Complaining to God
The power of lamentation suggests a new and needed liturgical style.
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May 14, 2008
The Banality of Evil
"Once you perceive your victim as a faceless non-human, dehumanizing policies are possible."
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May 13, 2008
Fahrenheit 451
Fifty-four years after its publication, Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel transcends the framework within which it was placed.
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May 13, 2008
Personal Recollections of Richard Rorty
As a person Dick was thoroughly lovable, and as a philosopher both extraordinarily perceptive and, at times, intensely irritating.
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May 13, 2008
1958: The War of the Intellectuals
Fifty years ago, Eisenhower was in the White House, the country was in a recession and the American intellectual scene was crackling with energy.
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May 09, 2008
Modes of Philosophizing: A Round-Table Debate
Big questions posed to four prominent British and US philosophers.
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May 09, 2008
Help the Environment: Eat Insects
A group of experts endorse bugs as a nutritious and sustainable food source.
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May 09, 2008
Quantum Cribsheet
Seed Magazine offers a cribsheet on quantum computing. We could all use some brushing up...
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May 08, 2008
Becoming Richard Rorty
Neil Gross’s book Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher is not exactly a biography of its subject... Rather, it is a study of how institutional forces shape an intellectual’s sense of personal identity, and vice versa.
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May 08, 2008
The Intertextualists
Language makes us capable of talking about ourselves and itself, and does one only by doing the other.
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May 08, 2008
The End of Time
We used to think the universe was never-ending in both age and extent, but recent research is challenging this idea. Can the universe die?
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May 07, 2008
Education's End
“For American higher education, it's no longer worthwhile to investigate the essential questions that have puzzled humans for thousands of years... Curious 20-year-olds will have to look outside their college classrooms for answers.”
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May 07, 2008
Stages of Thought
"Philosophers often try to write about Shakespeare," writes Martha Nussbaum. "Most of the time they are ill-equipped to do so."
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May 07, 2008
Where Are They?
Why Nick Bostrom hopes the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.
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May 05, 2008
Economists: Big Business Needs Aristotelian Virtue
Aristotle emphasized character over consequences. Could it work for big business?
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May 05, 2008
Is Liberal Catholicism Dead?
Has Pope Benedict’s contriteness over sex abuse in the Church effectively “neutralized the last great rallying point for what was once a feisty and optimistic style of progressivism”?
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May 05, 2008
A Transcendental Philosophy of Science?
"There is now a small but vociferous group who claim that philosophy of science should take Kant more seriously, in particular that it should admit that its unabashedly naturalistic take on science is deeply flawed."
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May 01, 2008
Rethinking Expertise
What is an expert? And how can we assess the advice of others whose competence we don't share?
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May 01, 2008
Three Words That Could Overthrow Physics
The standard model still doesn't describe magnets' spooky action at a distance.
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May 01, 2008
What was a liberal education?
A distance traveled is not necessarily progress logged.
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April 28, 2008
Why Beautiful Art Matters
"The cultural direction isn’t to the left or right, it’s hierarchical. Beauty provides the key to a [...] world that reflects the timeless values and permanent truths that conservatives hold dear: faith, transcendence, virtue, freedom, God, patriotism, natural law, conservation."
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April 28, 2008
The Universe on a String
String theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein's notions of gravity and space-time to superstring theory.
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April 28, 2008
The Fantastic Appeal of Fantasy
The more rational the world gets, the more we demand the irrational in our fiction.
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April 25, 2008
Looking Back at the End of Science
More than a decade after its original publication, does the prophecy of a controversial book still ring true?
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April 25, 2008
Global Museums in the Twenty-First Century
City planners ignore that the cultural needs of the local population are quite different from those of business and the tourist industry.
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April 25, 2008
More French Theory in America
Well, there’s life in that old dog yet. More than 600 comments later, it is clear that terms like deconstruction and postmodernism still have the capacity to produce excitement and outrage.
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April 25, 2008
What Genes Remember
"Could it be that historical traumas, such as transatlantic slavery, leave some kind of genetic mark on the descendants of their victims?"
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April 24, 2008
Reading the Brain Reading
Neuroaesthetics, the latest trend in literary theory, provides a window on the academy's weaknesses.
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April 24, 2008
French Theory
Fish and his interlocutors reduce Cusset’s rich, subtle, and paradox-minded book (now arriving in translation) into one more tale of how tenured pseudoradicalism rose to power in the United States. Of course there is always an audience for that sort of thing.
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April 24, 2008
Breaking the Galilean Spell
My aim is to reinvent the sacred. I present a new view of a fully natural God and of the sacred, based on a new, emerging scientific worldview.
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April 18, 2008
Is the Renaissance Scholar Dead?
Two pundits duke it out in an Agora Forum.
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April 18, 2008
Atoning for the Sins of the Fathers
Can ritual and symbolism play a role in healing the Catholic Church after the child sex abuse scandal?
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April 18, 2008
Can Jews Appreciate Church Bells?
"Even before there was multiculturalism, there was respect for human variety and pleasure in it."
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April 17, 2008
Coming of Age on Antidepressants
“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”
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April 17, 2008
Flaws of Gravity
Reading an enlightening new biography by Peter Ackroyd, Christopher Hitchens learns that Newton ... did have some pretty funny ideas about sex, gold, and religion.
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April 17, 2008
Total Recall
How much would you pay to have a small memory chip implanted in your brain if that chip would double the capacity of your short-term memory? Or guarantee that you would never again forget a face or a name?
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