Neil Campbell, Mental Causation: A Nonreductive Approach. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. x + 113pp. ISBN 978-1-4331-0374-2 (€ 38.00 £ 28.50 US $ 58.95) As the intrepid Sister Gertrude reminds us in Muriel Sparks’ The Abbess of Crewes: a problem you solve; a paradox you live with. A long-standing question in philosophy is whether the…
My inbox filled up faster than a grad student at a reception for the guest speaker with emails from correspondents alerting me to this pronouncement by Mark C. Taylor, calling graduate education “the Detroit of higher learning.” Readers of this blog will find nothing new in Taylor’s bill of particulars: we produce graduates for whom…
The problems we face today—economic collapse, environmental degradation, energy needs—are so broad and complex that they seem intractable. Plenty of brain-power is being applied to our situation, and there is no shortage of individuals trained at our blue-chip academic institutions on Wall Street , in the halls of government, and in corporate enterprises. And yet,…
Hey, do I look like I’m kidding? Well, okay, yes, I usually look like I’m kidding. But in more ways than one, I’m serious when I say that Metanexus 2009 promises to be our hottest conference yet. The year 2009 has been named The International Year of Astronomy. According to the official website of the…
With everything going on in the world today—economic crises; issues with energy, food, and water; war and terrorism; critical elections—it is easy, I suppose, to lose sight of the “big picture.” Is there some way all of these issues we face, crises we have to confront, and choices we have to make fit together? Why…
Metanexus is not a political organization, but I hope you will indulge me for a brief observation. We’re coming to the end of the presidential election season here in the U.S. As usual, the race is a close one and will very likely be decided by independent voters. In fact, “independent” is the nation’s largest…
[The following remarks were made by yours truly to open the 2008 Metanexus Conference in Madrid] Now to the business at hand…. MIHI QUAESTIO FACTUS SUM(I have become a question to myself.)Augustini Confessiones (liber X, caput xxxiii) Who are we? Why are we here? In our age, it is science that purports to answer these…
One does what one can to give science, religion, art, and culture a good name, but sometimes all you get is a load of Bovine Excrement (and if we didn’t laugh, we’d crack!): 1. Australian catastrophist Tim Flannery has argued that a good way to fight global warming is by pumping sulphur into the atmosphere. The…
Spring is here, and that means that “conference mode” is in full flower here at the Institute! Plans are coming along nicely for what promises to be a fantastic Metanexus Conference 2008 in Madrid, July 13-17. If you have not done so already, you can register for the conference online. Featured speakers include William Chittick,…
Following up on the CUA conference (see previous post), here’s some wisdom from Jacques Maritain, the “old peasant of the Garonne” who helped us understand the “true new fire” of the post-Vatican II church: We would be making a big mistake, as I said in a previous section, if we believed that men who are…