As the Worm Turns

Richard Rorty has died.
Like many philosophers, I moved from reading cheap Penguin editions of Plato to reading Rorty — primarily because Rorty was much easier than reading Heidegger. While I eventually came to disagree with his positions he was still a huge formative influence. I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing had I not […]

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This is just a brief follow-up on my earlier post on relativism and post-modernism. While the connection was in the back of my mind I failed to make it explicit.
The kind of relativism that leads to paradigmatic crank/absolutist argumentation — the kind of argumentation where the goal is to defeat the opponent rather than convince […]

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There are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys are — to my mind — those who think and reason about questions, trying to find true answers. The bad guys are those who think and reason in order to jury-rig and ad hoc justifications for their previously-held prejudices.
Mike S. Adams is a […]

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If you ask most atheists they’ll tell you that religious theists are somehow profoundly mistaken about their belief. Just ask Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and your local blog commenters.
But there are plenty of very smart, thoughtful theists with very strong answers to most atheist critiques of religion. So why do atheists think believers are deluded […]

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This seems like an incredibly useful site, if only for resources like How to Be a Crank. The steps seem pretty simple: come up with a wacky idea, disseminate it amongst the gullible, refuse to respond to criticism and claim persecution when people try to engage you in open debate. It doesn’t just sound like […]

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I am fully ensconced in my new interweb digs. Whereas yesterday these bits and bytes were slung at you from… wherever Wordpress.com keeps their servers (I know I could find this info, I just don’t wanna), now my digital information is being dispensed from San Francisco. That’s right — what you’re reading right now has […]

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