Stephen Jay Gould‘s famous ‘Two Separate Domains‘ argues, roughly, that religion and science operate in different domains of inquiry, and as such do not conflict with each other: We get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.Continue reading “Stephen Jay Gould’s Weak Argument For Science And Religion’s ‘Separate Domains’”
Category Archives: Philosophy
Angela Davis On Reparation, Reconciliation, And Prison Abolition
In Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, New York, 2003, pp. 106) Angela Davis writes: It is true that if we focus myopically on the existing system–and perhaps this is the problem that leads to the assumption that imprisonment is the only alternative to death–it is very hard to imagine a structurally similar system capable of handling such a vastContinue reading “Angela Davis On Reparation, Reconciliation, And Prison Abolition”
Kōbō Abe’s ‘Woman in The Dunes’ And The Scientist’s Existentialist Despair
Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes wears and displays its existentialist, absurdist aspirations openly and transparently; this is its terse Wikipedia summation: In 1955, Jumpei Niki, a schoolteacher from Tokyo, visits a fishing village to collect insects. After missing the last bus, he is led, by the villagers, in an act of apparent hospitality, to a houseContinue reading “Kōbō Abe’s ‘Woman in The Dunes’ And The Scientist’s Existentialist Despair”
Alasdair MacIntyre On Relativism And The Immigrant
In ‘Relativism, Power, and Philosophy,’ (Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association,Vol. 59, No. 1, September 1985, pp. 5-22) Alasdair MacIntyre writes: ‘Relativism’…names one kind of conclusion to enquiry into a particular class of problems. Those questions arise in the first place for people who live in certain highly specific types of social andContinue reading “Alasdair MacIntyre On Relativism And The Immigrant”
Hume’s Atheism And God As Nature
The ‘freethinker’ Anthony Collins is said to have commented on Samuel Clarke‘s Boyle Lectures on the existence of God that “it had never occurred to anyone to doubt the existence of God until Clarke tried so hard to prove it.” (noted in John Clayton’s Reason, Religion, and Gods: Essays in Cross Cultural Philosophy of Religion,Continue reading “Hume’s Atheism And God As Nature”
On Voting ‘Yes’ On The CUNY Strike Authorization Vote
Yesterday, like many of my colleagues at the City University of New York I voted ‘Yes’ on our union’s strike authorization vote. (The voting period ends May 11th; at that time, the PSC-CUNY will be able to inform CUNY administration of the extent of faculty and staff support for a strike.) A strike is seriousContinue reading “On Voting ‘Yes’ On The CUNY Strike Authorization Vote”
Derrida And Beauvoir On The ‘Powerless,’ ‘Not Bothersome’ Intellectual
In ‘The Ends of Man,’ (from After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, MIT Press, 1987, pp. 129), Jacques Derrida writes: It would be illusory to believe that political innocence has been restored and evil complicities undone when opposition to them can be expressed in the country itself, notContinue reading “Derrida And Beauvoir On The ‘Powerless,’ ‘Not Bothersome’ Intellectual”
The Lost Art Of Navigation And The Making Of New Selves
Giving, and following, driving directions was an art. A cartographic communication, conveyed and conducted by spoken description, verbal transcription, and subsequent decipherment. You asked for a route to a destination, and your partner in navigation issued a list of waypoints, landmarks, and driving instructions; you wrote these down (or bravely, committed them to memory); then,Continue reading “The Lost Art Of Navigation And The Making Of New Selves”
Foucault On ‘Blackmail Serving To Limit The Exercise Of Criticism’
In ‘Questions of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault‘ (from After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, MIT Press, 1987, pp. 114), Foucault responds to the question of whether his writings in Discipline and Punish had an ‘anaesthetizing effect’ on ‘social workers in prisons’: Paralysis isn’t the same thing asContinue reading “Foucault On ‘Blackmail Serving To Limit The Exercise Of Criticism’”
William H. Gass On The Dialectical Nature Of Love
In Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translations (Perseus Books, New York, 1999, pp. 13) William H. Gass writes: During childhood, contradiction paves every avenue of feeling, and we grow up in bewilderment like a bird in a ballroom, with all that space and none meant for flying, a wide shining floor and nowhere to light.Continue reading “William H. Gass On The Dialectical Nature Of Love”
Samir Chopra 