Thinking
“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life …”
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Turns out it’s serious business when someone is wrong on the internet … Two friends build a wind-powered car that travels directly downwind faster than the wind. It’s a neat case study in bias.
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From The Onion: What’s that? Now it’s making an appeal to reason? Never! Do you hear me, you eloquent, well-read behemoth? Never! We’ll die before we recognize what we secretly know to be true! The cognitive dissonance only makes our denial stronger! Via STR
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I wrote the following as part of an ongoing debate over my solution to the problem of universals. I leave it for the reader to surmise why I thought it worth sharing here. Let me take a moment to make a meta-argument before I dive back in to addressing the comments in this thread. I…
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Billy Beck, the best blogger out there, brought Fred Hiat’s June 9 meditation on the "’Bush Lied’ story line" to my attention. Hiat argues or implies that The Rockefeller report, which has been taken by the "Bush Lied" partisans as clear-cut vindication of their claims, in fact shows that Bush did not lie, but rather…
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This is the fifth entry in my Antistatism Series. The more I study the Enlightenment, the more astounded I am at the depth and breadth of its contours, and at boldness of its heroes as they sought to shape the West to their new vision. One contour that I think Objectivists admire too distantly was…
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I will never forget this. One morning, when I was about seven years old, I sat down with my younger brother and sister to a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. I dug in immediately, preferring my eggs as warm as possible. “Look!”, came a cry from across the dining room table. It was my…
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One of the things I find most striking about Objectivism is its subtlety. I’m in the minority. The lucidity of Ayn Rand’s writing, I think, tends to fool her admirers nearly as often as it fools her critics. She reduces complex issues to essentials, casts fine lines of distinction in sharp relief, illuminates the obscure,…
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[T]he great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. —Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. —Henry David Thoreau I think not.
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Philosophizing is antisocial, perhaps the most perfectly antisocial activity possible, easily beating out murder. Even I will readily admit, however, that man is a social animal. Small wonder, then, that philosophy is most popular among those constitutionally incapable of engaging in it. Those who philosophize risk alienation, solipsism, exile, poisoning, poverty, passion, horror, ennui, and,…
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Earlier this month, Diana Hsieh posted a nice little jab at the profession of philosophy. Her title is a bit of a misnomer, as not all the points of mockery are apropos to “analytic” philosophers. That said, professional philosophers, be they the get of Wittgenstein or the spawn of Heidegger, deserve a great deal more…