What, Why & How do we Know ?
An excellent RSA (Royal Society of Arts) animation of a lecture by Iain McGilchrist. (Hat tip to David Morey on Facebook for the link.) Blogged several references to reading McGilchrist’s “The Master and his Emissary” but never wrote a complete review in one post – It so knocked me out, it led me into other … Continue reading “McGilchrist’s Divided Brain”
Men cause evil by wanting to heroically triumph over it. Ernest Becker, 1975 Simple statement of the problem(*). Taken from Roger Griffin’s 2007 “Modernism and Fascism“. Reading this slowly, because it is intellectually / technically wordy, but also because several other recent reads referred to it (including McGilchrist IIRC, though I’d bought it before I’d … Continue reading “Heroic Evil”
Another to add to the intriguing list of intellectuals converting to catholicism. Most famous for his much parodied “Trees”, but an interesting if brief life. I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. Picked-up on Kilmer because of this quote of the subsequent couplet … A tree whose hungry mouth is … Continue reading “(Alfred) Joyce Kilmer”
A new series of three essays and one poem from Alan Rayner, each describing his transfigural, inclusional “new way of thinking” … one which emphasizes neighbourhood over self & other, natural inclusion over natural selection, co-creation over winning & losing, love over conflict … using many of Alan’s established metaphors and quotations. This quote from Wordsworth … Continue reading “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”
Is a line from the wonderfully ironic “The Devil Wears Prada” a film I saw for about the 3rd or 4th time yesterday … just killing time … one of those films that always seems to be showing on some TV channel. I don’t know anything about the original writing behind it, and there is … Continue reading “Everybody Wants To Get Ahead ?”
Several different threads here. All mentioned before – reading Sam Harris “End of Faith” itself, a discussion thread on MoQ.Discuss with End of Faith title and several spin-off threads, and a discussion thread on Chairman Parker’s Blog. My position can be summarised quite easily. Tolerance of (misplaced) religious faith is as dangerous as extremes of … Continue reading “End of Faith in What ?”
And of course it occurred to me that the reason I was thinking about evolution in that inclusive sense was probably that Alan Rayner’s “Inclusional Research” web-site and forum had just gone live and I was browsing around it last night. Alan’s take on evolution from his inclusional perspective he calls “natural inclusion” rather as … Continue reading “Natural Inclusion”
“You’re missing something Dawkins” has been a theme of mine for some time – see my 2003″Hyper-rationalism” review of “A Devil’s Chaplain”. Here, via a link from Alan Rayner mentioned in the previous post, a review by Martin Lockley of Alister McGrath’s “Dawkins’ God”. Dawkins’ postures, therefore, only revive rather trivial historical debates and create … Continue reading “Dawkins’ God”