The Paranormal, Miracles and David Hume

Is parapsychology a pseudo-science? Many believe that the Eighteenth century philosopher David Hume showed, in effect, that it must be. In this article, Terence Penelhum explains and endorses Hume's arguments concerning testimony of the miraculous, but also explains why he believes there is now evidence of sufficient quality concerning the paranormal to make further investigation scientifically worthwhile...more here

Love's Philosophy

A mighty pain to love it is,
And 't is a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.
-from Abraham Crowley's "Anacreon

Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle;—
Why not I with thine?
— from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Love's Philosophy";

"What then is the nature of man...? Reason, Will, Affection. To a complete man belong the power of thought, the power of will, the power of affection.... We think for the sake of thinking; love for the sake of loving; will for the sake of willing — i.e., that we may be free."
— the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach

The job

The job of a porn star is not a calling -- or even an option -- for most women. However, if you make the right decisions and set the right boundaries for yourself, it can be a great living, because you'll make a lot of money while doing very little work. And you'll get more experience in front of the camera than a Hollywood actress. Though watching porn may seem degrading to some women, the fact is that it's one of the few jobs for women where you can get to a certain level, look around, and feel so powerful, not just in the work environment but as a sexual being. So fuck Gloria Steinem.

Jenna Jameson is a porn star. Perhaps even the porn star. And despite the title and the occasional pointed advice, How to Make Love Like A Porn Star is not a manual, it's an autobiography. Co-authored with rock writer extraordinaire Neil Strauss (The Dirt with Motley Crüe and The Long Hard Road Out of Hell with Marilyn Manson) Jameson's book is stylishly executed and well paced, a fascinating look at the Jennasis of a beautiful teenager from Las Vegas into the woman with perhaps the most famous breasts -- and other bits -- in the world...more here

Joy

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.

Soren Kierkegaard

Jesus story 'gets it 97% right'

It is 97 per cent certain that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead - based on sheer logic and mathematics, not faith - according to Oxford professor Richard Swinburne.

"New Testament scholars say the only evidence is witnesses in the four gospels. That's only 5 per cent of the evidence," Professor Swinburne, one of the world's leading philosophers of religion, said last night.

"We can't judge the question of the resurrection unless we ask first whether there's reason to suppose there is a God, second if we have reason to suppose he would become incarnate and third, if he did, whether he would live the sort of life Jesus did."

Professor Swinburne, in Melbourne to give several seminars and a public lecture at the Australian Catholic University last night, said the mathematics showed a probability of 97 per cent.

This conclusion was reached after a complex series of calculations. In simplified terms, it began with a single proposition: the probability was one in two that God exists.

Next, if God exists, the probability was one in two that he became incarnate. Further, there was a one in 10 probability that the gospels would report the life and resurrection of Jesus in the form they do.
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Finally, the clincher: the probability that we would have all this evidence if it wasn't true was one in 1000.

He argued that any evidence for the existence of God was an argument for the resurrection, and any evidence against the existence of God was an argument against the resurrection.

"Does he have reason to become incarnate? Yes, to make atonement, identify with our suffering and to teach us things, " Professor Swinburne said.

Even Jesus' life is not enough proof, he said. God's signature was needed, which the resurrection was, showing his approval of Jesus' teaching.

The mathematical equations appear in the book, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (OUP, 2003).

The Black Book of Religion

A Black Book of Religion, documenting the grievous offenses perpetrated in the name of God. The suicide bombers who have sown mayhem in Iraq, the Islamists who last year shredded railway passengers in Spain, or the demented Muslim who recently shot and stabbed a Dutch filmmaker, then pinned a note to his bleeding body boasting of his deed, are but current examples of an uncomfortable paradox. Few humans stoop lower, seemingly, than those whose gaze is fixed on heaven. The same transcendent epiphany that animates saints can perversely transform others into devils. Just how and why Dr. Jekyll becomes Mr. Hyde surely deserves keener attention from the devout of all faiths, or so it seems to me.

What follows is a prospectus, humbly submitted by a troubled secularist...more here

Who's Soren Now?

A battle is raging between two Danish scholars over the status of a prize-winning biography of Søren Kierkegaard that appeared in English translation in February of this year. Princeton University Press has called Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography “the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life”. Publishers Weekly calls it “monumental and magisterial”, and an American Kierkegaard scholar writing in The Wall Street Journal called it “superb”. Another scholar, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, said that while it was hard to imagine what a new biography of Kierkegaard might consist of, this most recent work had solved that problem “masterfully”. Danish reviewers have been similarly extravagant in their praise. A reviewer for the Danish newspaper Politiken asserted that no other biography “would ever even approach it, much less surpass it”.

The biography received the prestigious Georg Brandes Prize and the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen 's literary prize. It is in its fifth Danish edition. Since its publication in Denmark in 2000, it has been translated into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian, and now English. The George Brandes prize selection committee said they chose the work because of its “academic thoroughness” and because of the “rigour of the standards of verification to which it adhered”...more here

Immerse Yourself

I thank God that I am not dictator of the world. There would be perks. All of that sex, and being able to watch the opera from a seat at the front rather than standing at the back. But to spend one's life surrounded by flunkies and cronies, terrified of one's power and yet trying to feather their own nests – how awful! All a bit like the upper echelons of university administrations.

However, if I were world dictator, I know what would be my first action. It would be to abolish undergraduate degrees in philosophy. I would allow some courses – I might make it a necessary condition of getting a degree to take a course or two – and I might even allow minors. But there would be no one majoring in philosophy.

Given the fact that I am just completing my fortieth year as a philosophy professor, this must sound like a severe case of self hatred. You may think that I have so little regard for myself and my subject that I want to eliminate it from the curriculum, and hope eventually to starve it to death. This is far from being the case. Indeed, I am right there with Plato in thinking that philosophy is simply the most important subject there is. The unexamined life indeed is not worth living. There are times indeed when I do wish I were a man of action – an orthopedic surgeon or a firefighter – but I like to console myself by thinking everything and everyone else exists to make philosophers possible. We are at the peak of humankind...more here

Put your sweet lips . . .

In what must still be the longest single work devoted to the kiss — Opus Polyhistoricum . . . de Osculis — the German polymath Martin von Kempe (1642-83) assembled 1,040 closely packed pages of excerpts from classical, biblical, legal, medical and other learned sources to form a sort of encyclopaedia of kissing. He listed more than 20 types of kiss. These included the kiss of veneration, the kiss of peace, the kisses bestowed by Christians on images and relics, and by pagans on idols, the kissing of the Pope’s foot, the kiss bestowed by superiors on inferiors, the kiss used in academic degree ceremonies, the lovers’ kiss, the lustful and adulterous kiss, the kiss exchanged by couples sealing their marriage vows, the kiss of reconciliation, the kiss carrying contagion, the hypocritical kiss and the kiss of Judas...more here

It's a thing that happens to you

"It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.... You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

— wisdom from the Skin Horse in Margery Williams Bianco's children's classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real

The Sexual Politics of Breasts

It’s not often that you can accuse the Sun of sensitivity. But it did display unexpected tact the day the front page was devoted to Kylie Minogue’s breast cancer: it dropped the Page Three pin–up. Presumably they didn’t want to offend readers with any reminder that those pert, cheeky playthings can also harbour sinister hidden routes of dangerously connective hormones.

In fact, the Sun doesn’t savour any association with breasts other than titillation. A couple of months ago it ran a campaign to get Britney Spears to wear a bra because now that she’s pregnant hers are beginning to sag. And that’s disgusting.


The extent of this division between the breast’s erotic and nurturing functions seems an acute barometer of a culture’s well–being. In America, the spiritual home of the breast fetish, the separation has reached massive proportions. Women are so castigated for breastfeeding that determined mothers have resorted to forming associations like the Militant Breastfeeding Cult and Inciteful Mamas...more here
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Celebrity Psychos

Our celebrities are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. They’re on a dangerous rampage, and no one is safe. Christian Slater grabbed a woman’s bottom outside an Upper East Side deli, and Russell Crowe had a tantrum lengthy enough for him to rip a phone out of the wall, take it down the elevator, and throw it into the face of a clerk at the city’s most exclusive hotel. Dave Chappelle beat a quick path from his final Comedy Central tapings to South Africa, explaining he needed to go visit a friend, and Brad Pitt dyed his hair platinum (he got it done by Jen’s hairdresser!), played public footsie with Angelina Jolie, and paid the price with viral meningitis. Courtney Love, the patron saint of celebrity craziness, has been quiet lately, but getting larger. Who knows when she may erupt again. This summer, all outbreaks are only sideshows to the concurrent breakdown of Michael Jackson during his trial and the more recent mania of Tom Cruise, two of the biggest and most mysterious stars in the world unmasked as stark-raving lunatics. (The reeducation of Katie Holmes, the Manchurian Fiancée, continues apace.) Attack or be attacked: The other week, Leonardo DiCaprio was hanging out at a house party in the Hollywood Hills when one of the female guests hit him in the face with a bottle...more here

Possibility

"When you give someone a book, you don't give him just paper, ink, and glue. You give him the possibility of a whole new life." - Christopher Morley

Franz Kafka

The diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923

The Greatest Sentence

I move my lips when I read a well-written sentence. It surprises me that this is considered a hallmark of stupidity, as though I were still trapped in a regressive state where I had to sound out syllables to discover meaning. I am mouthing the words as I consume them so I can assimilate them, to make them my own. I am relishing the taste of good words...more here

Buddhists, Existentialists and Situationists: Waking up in Waking Life

Richard Linklater's 2002 film Waking Life is all about dreaming, and how we can sometimes control our dreams when they're lucid. Yet it's also about some broad philosophical issues, including one of the oldest philosophical conundrums, the distinction between appearance and reality. When René Descartes sat at his stove and meditated on the world and on whether an evil demon controlled everything he perceived, he wondered, what's more real, dreams or waking life? The diverse collection of characters in Linklater's film ask the same question. Yet they ask it not just in a literal sense, but also as a metaphor for the nature of modern culture and for the human condition as a whole - in what ways do we fall asleep even while awake? How can we lead a life that is more awake, more aware of people and things, more authentic? The film provides the outlines of three wake-up calls to three more-or-less separate ways in we sleep too easily.

This issue is not new. It goes all the way back to Plato's Allegory of the Cave: what if you were chained in a dimly-lit cave your whole life where you saw only the shadows of real things passing by the entrance to your cave reflected on its back wall? Suddenly, you're freed, and come into the sunlight. Would you recognize this new world as more real than your cave? And would you be able to convince those still enchained in the cave that there was a greater world outside their dwelling? Would you be able, in Plato's terms, to wake up to reality?...more here

Nonsense in vogue

Students of language have long argued that common usages of words are as important as official definitions, since words often soak up assumptions of the day. This causes problems when commonplace usages of words override all other possible meanings. As Francis Bacon observed, language can trick us into uncritically accepting assumptions associated with particular words--a fallacy he called the "idol of the marketplace."

Consider the common advice that "we must be careful not to generalize." This adage implies that generalization is inherently wrong and we should take special care to avoid it. Yet generalization is needed to understand the complex world we live in, and science and rational thought would be impossible without it. In addition, note the paradox that the statement "we must be careful not to generalize" is itself a generalization, so we would disobey the advice if we followed it! Clearly, words like generalization carry unstated cultural assumptions that confuse rather than clarify discussions...more here

Why Marx is man of the moment

A penniless asylum seeker in London was vilified across two pages of the Daily Mail last week. No surprises there, perhaps - except that the villain in question has been dead since 1883. 'Marx the Monster' was the Mail's furious reaction to the news that thousands of Radio 4 listeners had chosen Karl Marx as their favourite thinker. 'His genocidal disciples include Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - and even Mugabe. So why has Karl Marx just been voted the greatest philosopher ever?'...more here

Nabokov's Pale Fire

John Shade's "Pale Fire" opens with an extraordinary series of images whose initial impact lingers in the mind as it expands in implication throughout the poem:


I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.


As we learn more about Shade's lifelong attempt to understand a world where life is surrounded by death, we realize the full resonance of these opening lines: that he is projecting himself in imagination into the waxwing, as if it were somehow still flying beyond death, and into the reflected azure of the window, as if that were the cloudlessness of some hereafter, even as he stands looking at "the smudge of ashen fluff" of the dead bird's little body... more

The Cradle Rocks above an Abyss

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heart-beats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first-time at home-made movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby-carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

The opening paragraph of Nabokov's Speak, Memory

Allegorical Underworld

Kontroll is an energetic piece of pulp fiction that, still working with old-fashioned film stock and locations, constructs its allegorical Sin City of Dreadful Night in the depths of the Budapest subway system... more

The book to end all books

Paperback not so much of the week as of the year, of the decade - or, I am inclined to say, of all time. And why? Because it's the best book ever written, that's why. I use the word "book" with care. It's not a novel, a tract, an epic poem, a history; it is, quite self-consciously, the book to end all books. Made out of all the books that existed in a 17th-century library, it was compiled in order to explain and account for all human emotion and thought. It is not restricted to melancholy, or, as we call it today, depression; but then a true study of it will have to be - if you have the learning and the stamina - about everything. That is why there are about 1,400 pages in this edition, why the only other edition, from Clarendon Press, runs to three volumes (it also costs a bomb compared to this and is, anyway, out of print), and why Burton never, strictly speaking, finished it: there was always something else to go in...more

The Bits

At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see.
Philip Larkin (1922–1986), British poet. “The Old Fools.”

If Only

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

— Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, who returned to Russia in 1994, choosing to go by a route across the Siberia of his Gulag days

At a Certain Age

We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
Was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.
It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: "That's me."

Czeslaw Milosz (Nobel, 1980)

Rendezvous with Death

Among those killed in action on this day in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme was Alan Seeger (uncle of Pete Seeger), a twenty-eight-year-old poet who had gone to live in Left Bank Paris, and had joined the French Foreign Legion in order to fight in the war. From Seeger's "Rendezvous with Death":

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air —
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.