In this post I will argue that libertarianism cannot actually explain or make rational why an agent chooses one course of action over another. I will do this by arguing that though libertarianism seems to be able to explain why an agent acts the way she does at some given moment in time, even though the action is not causally determined, libertarianism cannot explain why the agent does that action instead of some other action. I find this troubling, since…
What follows is that outline considering possible reasons for endorsing some kind of theism. Importantly, it is just an outline; so its details need to be filled in. Were that filling in to occur, I’m sure that certain points might get modified, added, or rejected. Further, a lot of it is based on things I have written about more extensively in my notebooks and as such a number of things will be presented that might not make sense or for…
My friend Jennie and I used to argue often about the different ways that poetry and philosophy go about examining the world and attempting to speak truly about it. She always claimed that there were certain truths, usually of a spiritual nature, or if not spiritual, then about particular deep aspects of life and nature, that poetry was better at investigating and expressing than philosophy. I’m not in a position to give her reasons for these claims. And I don’t…
In my last blog post, I indicated that I believed that the religious extremes that dominate public discussion of religion are dangerous. Here I will briefly give reasons for thinking that is true. To begin, I consider atheism and agnosticism to both be religious perspectives simply because they concern religion or religious issues. So one can be an atheist and still be a religious extremist. In my last post I wrote: “On the one hand, there are those who openly,…
My concern is to promote the middle ground between these two poles. I take that middle ground to consist not necessarily of belief in God (though it by no means excludes it) but in taking religion and man’s religious yearnings seriously, while at the same time seeking to approach the issues as rationally and charitably as possible.
This is the review I wrote on Amazon.com: Even though Wittgenstein’s German is nothing like Kant’s, providing a good translation of his work is a challenge given all that one must bring into consideration. Anscombe’s original translation had its merits, but it also had a number of frustrating flaws. One of the many problems with Anscombe’s translation of PI, is her translation of both “hinweisende Erklärung” and “hinweisende Definition” as “ostensive definition,” where the former is more literally read as…