If you haven’t been following 3:AM’s interview series, you should. The Brian Leiter interview was one of the most cogent assessments of philosophy I’ve read in years, and the recent Eric Schwitzgebel interview is on par. Both reward close reading and deserve extended comment, but I want to touch briefly on Schwitzgebel’s assessment of the [...]
Tags:Brian Leiter·commonsense·crazyism·Emerson·Eric Schwitzgebel·evolved mind·metaphysics·Nietzsche
A place for everything and everything in its place. This is not just a mantra for those with obsessive tendencies. It also describes the drive that some have toward a system: a unified theory of everything.
Before the Enlightenment, there was no need for such a theory. God served this purpose and everything was explained by [...]
Tags:Darwinian monism·David Sloan Wilson·dualism·EO Wilson·Ernst Haeckel·Hegel·Kant·metaphysics·metatheory·monism·Neil deGrasse Tyson·Nietzsche·Niles Holt·science as religion·systematization·theory of everything·unified theory
The person who lives inside your head may seem rational and honest, but who is fooling who? If you are fortunate there is only one voice and if you are sober the voice should be sensible. Or so we would like to think. Two recent studies suggest otherwise. As it turns out, our homunculi are [...]
Tags:Christoph Korn·cognitive dissonance·error coding·homunculus·information bias·lying·Nietzsche·Raymond Dolan·Robert Trivers·self deception·self-deceit·Tali Sharot·truth claims·unrealistic optimism·untruth as condition of life·William von Hippel
Although I can acknowledge that the world is a better place because Steven Pinker is in it, it is harder for me to acknowledge — as Pinker argues in his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature — that the world has gotten better because violence has progressively declined during the course of human [...]
Tags:Better Angels of Our Nature·biological determinism·biology·conflict·culture·eternal recurrence·eternal return·Milan Kundera·Nietzsche·peace·Peter Singer·sociobiology·Steven Pinker·The Blank Slate·Unbearable Lightness of Being·violence·war
When it comes to classic anthropology, Margaret Mead may garner the lionesses’ share of attention but Ruth Benedict remains the matriarch. Although Benedict today is dismissed by some as a quaint relic of the “culture and personality” school of anthropology, such demurrals underestimate the theoretical sophistication and continuing relevance of Benedict’s work.
Those who understand Patterns [...]
Tags:Apollo·Chrysanthemum and the Sword·culture and personality school·Dionysius·Dobu·Franz Boas·Great Plains·Japan·Kwakiutl·Margaret Mead·Native American·Nietzsche·nomads·particularism·Patterns of Culture·Plains culture area·psychoanalytic·Ruth Benedict·shamans·thick description·variation·vision quest·Zuni
In less than a month, we will be able to lay our hands on Robert Bellah’s much anticipated Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age.
It will be the latest in a string of books over the last decade which purport to explain the origins and development of what we today call [...]
Tags:axial age·brain evolution·group size·Hegel·Kant·metaphysical idealism·Neolithic Revolution·Nietzsche·Religion in Human Evolution·Robert Bellah·Robin Dunbar·Templeton Foundation
Over at Slate Matt Feeney explores the connection, if any, between the Arizona shooter’s nihilism and admiration for Nietzsche. Along the way, Matt sparks the major works:
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s first work, it’s the celebration of anarchic and sexually with-it Dionysus over boring Apollo, who’s like the Greek god of algebra or something. [...]
Tags:Arizona shooting·Gabrielle Giffords·Jared Loughner·Matt Feeney·metaphysics·Nietzsche·nihilism
Until recently, I was unaware of the fact that Norway plays host to several of the most extreme metal bands in the world. These guys do not just play unbearable music while wearing hellish costumes; unlike most dark metal bands, they take their ideas seriously and live accordingly. They have burned many churches in Norway [...]
Tags:Beowulf·Bergen·black metal·Espedal·folk beliefs·Gaahl·Gorgoroth·metal·Nietzsche·Norse paganism·Norse shamanism·Norway·Odin·pagans·Satanism·Scandinavian landscape·Thor·True Norwegian Black Metal·Vikings
As I noted in A Tale of Two Religion Scholars, Dr. Michael Blume’s research (which you can find at Homo religious) shows that religious groups out-reproduce their secular counterparts. The data are solid and correspond to the commandments of most religions: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Given that religious people make more babies than secular people, Blume [...]
Tags:agnosticism·atheism·carrying capacity·confirmation bias·Darwin·extended lactation·fertility·fitness benefits·Freud·group level selection·group size·ideological causation·infanticide·John Hawks·Marx·Michael Blume·Nietzsche·Paleolithic shamanism·religious·reproduction·Rodney Stark·secular·secularism
Over at Seed, the clinical physician David Weisman weighs in on the centuries old debate regarding the existence of souls and suggests that the widely held notion of a soul is inextricably linked to an erroneous sense of unified mind. This debate was famously framed by Descartes, who proclaimed — as a first principle and [...]
Tags:A Mind So Rare·aphasia·Beyond Good and Evil·Cartesian dualism·cogito·commonsense dualism·consciousness·David Weisman·Descartes·Divided Minds Specious Souls·evolutionary psychology·How the Mind Works·ischemia·Merlin Donald·mind·modular·modularity·Nietzsche·soul·soulists·souls·spirit·Stephen Pinker·subconscious·subjectivity·unified mind
