God and God’s Ways

Last week, I received an email out of the blue from a complete stranger, asking me questions about God.  It was sent with an earnest curiosity, and so I took the time to answer.  Below is an edited version of the conversation, given some literary license and with his identity changed.   -- Dear Professor …

Pride and the Ability to Change

...quia quod quis vehementer desiderat, facile credit. The other day, I saw retweeted into my Twitter timeline an old post on NYMag.com, claiming that with the help of a therapist, anyone can change his or her personality.  Ignoring from the eyeroll-inducing shilling for the psychiatric profession, the article made me think: how popular is the belief …

Sex, Power, and Instinct

Sexual harassment has been a regular in the news cycle for the past twenty-plus years--often but not always as a tool of political exposure.  Powerful men with covered-up but uncurbed desires have been a mainstay of U.S. politics and political news coverage since Anita Hill leveled unproven, but not disproven, accusations against Clarence Thomas in …

A Short: What is Philosophy?

In yesterday morning's reads, I came across this piece by Charlie Huenemann, "Why philosophers should hang out at the humanists' parties" at Aeon Magazine, but delayed it until today.  It is quite bad, altogether misconstrues the nature of philosophical reasoning, and demonstrates that having a PhD in philosophy does not mean you know what "philosophy" …

On the Art of Annotation, etc.

I often wonder, when reading, how much work the author put into writing the work.  I know that, in my own book-and-article-writing endeavors, what ends up on the page amounts to less than 1/10th of what I do elsewhere in the process (including all of the editing and revising, which is never less than 2/3rds …

Worldviews, Atheist and Theist

I'll be perfectly honest: there are a good many atheists whom I like a great deal better than a good many theists, not just because they are more fun to be around, but because they are genuinely better human beings, in any number of ways.  This has very little if anything to do with their …

Control, Death, and Delusion

Among my morning reading fell this piece Susie Neilson at Nautilus, titled, "Here's How To Make Climate Change Extra Scary".  It could also be titled, "How Can We Strategize To Get More Money for Climate Change Research" or "Silly Ways To Prey On Fear".  In short, the "article" asserts that climate change is not found …

Activity and Merit

As brought to my attention in a post yesterday at the Daily Nous, the "party philosopher" of the German nationalist party Alternative für Deutschland, Marc Jongen, was invited to speak at "Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times", a conference hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.  Jongen seems like not only a curious …

The Burden of Being

As part of my morning reading, I came across this article by David Benatar, "Kids? Just say no" on Aeon Magazine.  I must be something of a masochist, because I read the entire piece.  In short, the article is a utilitarian argument against procreation because life is more bad than good--an argument that Benatar has evidently …

Perception

In addition to my own work in Thomism, semiotics, and phenomenology, over the summer I became a Fellow with the Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL), where I have been helping in an on-going discussion with many others on the topic of perception.  This discussion, carried on via Slack, has covered a wide range …