It is nice to see Lucretius finally getting his due. In The Swerve: How The World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt pays homage to the Roman poet (and his Greek predecessor Epicurus). A few years ago, I was thinking about the history of religious critiques and sketched these notes:
While it would be tempting to date the [...]
Tags:atheism·critiques of religion·David Hume·Epicurus·Greek gods·Lucretius·materialism·naturalism·On the Nature of Things·skepticism·Stephen Greenblatt·teleology·The Swerve
Humans everywhere are inveterate storytellers. Because storytelling, in the form of narrative, is found in all cultures and is structurally similar — with agents and action linked together by causation — there is excellent reason to think this ability is the result of intense selection pressure and is not simply a byproduct of other cognitive [...]
Tags:adaptation·agency detection·ancestral environment·archetypes·byproduct·causal attribution·causation·cause·correlation·David Hume·effect·folklore·Immanuel Kant·information·language·Michelle Scalise Sugiyama·narration·narrative·social information·stories·storytelling·tales·theory of mind
Our correspondent at The Economist reviews what looks to a provocative new book by Philipp Blom, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment.
Blom sets his book around the happenings of an exceptional Parisian salon — that of Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach — who hosted the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Denis [...]
Tags:A Wicked Company·atheism·Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach·commonsense dualism·counter-Enlightenment·David Hume·Denis Diderot·enlightenment·godless·magical thinking·materialism·mechanistic·Parisian salon·Phillipp Blom·Rousseau·soul beliefs·Voltaire
Ritual and religion are, as everyone knows, closely intertwined. So tightly linked are they that some scholars, such as Emile Durkheim, seem to have mistaken one for the other or at least conflated the two. For those who cannot accept Durkheim’s position, there are two competing explanations for the origin of ritual. The first is [...]
Tags:anxiety·augury·autoeroticism·Barbara Smuts·causal illusion·college football gods·college football religion·confession·corn husking·Cornhuskers·costly signaling·David Hume·Emile Durkheim·football·gods·guilt·Huskers·Immanuel Kant·John Watanabe·Jonathan Z. Smith·Joseph Bulbulia·male baboons·masturbation·mythology·narcissism·Nebraska·Nebraska Fan's Confession·omen·Onan·onanism·propitious coincidence·randomly connected events·Richard Sosis·ritual·ritualized greetings·rituals·Roman ritual·Roy Rappaport·serendipity·solipsism·Superstitition in the Pigeon·The Bare Facts of Ritual·thrill of coincidence
As many know, Christopher Hitchens (the cheeky British gadfly of God) has esophageal cancer. Although he announced this and took a break to undergo treatment, I noticed last week he had resumed writing some columns. Yesterday, I found this recent video interview over at The Atlantic; it is simultaneously heart-wrenching and moving.
It is heart-wrenching because [...]
Tags:afterlife·atheist·cancer·Christopher Hitchens·David Hume·deathbed·gadfly of God·God is Not Great·Hitch-22·immortality·James Boswell·Jeffrey Goldberg·prayer·Samuel Johnston·Scottish Enlightenment·The Atlantic·video interview
While doing some background research on the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), I discovered that he had been much influenced by Lucretius, who lived in the first century BCE (around the time of Julius Caesar) and published a six-volume treatise titled On the Nature of Things. As if writing philosophy in narrative form were [...]
Tags:ancestor worship·atomic theory·Charles Darwin·Christianity·classics·cultural evolution·David Hume·David Sedley·Epicurean·Epicurus·evolution·Greco-Roman·Herbert Spencer·Julius Caesar·Lucretius·materialism·naturalism·Nietzsche·On the Nature of Things·Plato·Platonic philosophy·prehistory·Scottish Enlightenment·skepticism·survival of the fittest·Thomas Hobbes
In keeping with the themes from my previous posts on prayer/probabilities and supplication/statistics, it would be remiss not to discuss B.F. Skinner’s classic 1948 study in which he demonstrated that the regular delivery or occurrence of something — or what might be called consistency of experience over time — can result in the (mistaken) perception [...]
Tags:B.F. Skinner·causation·chance·contingency·correlation·David Hume·magic·pigeons·prayer·probability·ritual·rituals·statistics·superstition·supplication
There are two interesting items over at HuffPo Religion that allow me to revisit — if only briefly — some previous posts. In the first, Angelina Bonavoglia reports that Cardinal William Levada, a major Vatican player who is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, blames celibacy for the sexual abuse scandals [...]
Tags:Cardinal Levada·celibacy·David Hume·empricism·sexual reproduction
