14 tidbits to stir in your coffee (or tea) when the sloth visits.

{Via MyCoffeeBreak on Pinterest & Vintage-Retro on Tumblr}

OCT 14, 2013VIA CAROLYN RIKER 17 COMMENTS

I am not depressed but more like selectively choosing not to engage in a dramatic affair with life.

I call it my inner sloth.

The Day Dostoyevsky Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Dream

“And it is so simple… You will instantly find how to live.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

 

Philosophy of Science

What Did Nietzsche Really Mean When He Wrote “God is Dead”?

 

 

 

8.11.2016

The quote inspired an anxious 1966 Time magazine cover, and a preachy 2016 movie franchise that works hard to inoculate the faithful against atheism’s threatening seductions: “God is Dead,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1882 book of incisive aphorisms, The Gay Science, and unwittingly coined a phrase now inseparable from 20th century culture wars. Of course, Nietzsche knew he was tossing a Molotov cocktail into the fraught culture wars of his own time, but he didn’t blow things up for the sheer pleasure of it. Instead, his blunt assertion lay at the heart of what Nietzsche saw as both a tremendous problem and a necessary realization.

Philosophy of biology

 

 

The philosophy of biology is a subfield of philosophy of science, which deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers of science and philosophers generally have long been interested in biology (e.g., Aristotle, Descartes, and even Kant), philosophy of biology only emerged as an independent field of philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s.

Autonomy for a ‘new world’?

OLLE NORDBERG – Coastal View

4th New World Summit, Royal Flemish Theatre, Brussels, 19-21 September 2014

E. C. Feiss

Blooming in the shadow of an austerity-era EU cultural policy dominated by ‘measurable outcomes’ that has tasked the cultural field with a plethora of social work from civic engagement, care work and alleviating unemployment to any number of regeneration-based solutions, a number of recent ‘critical’ art practices have come to articulate a politics of ‘demonstrable impact.’ [1] Putting art ‘to work’ for society must be understood in parallel here with neoliberal policies which have pushed formerly public goods and services into the ‘private sphere’.

Harvard Dean Lists the 5 Essential Questions to Ask In Life … Which Will Bring You Happiness & Success

 

The Moon, Tetsis Panagiotis, 1998, Greek, 1925-2016

in Graduation Speech, Life| June 13th, 2016 1 Comment

 

And now for a different kind of graduation speech.

Most commencement speeches provide answers of sorts–pieces of wisdom you can carry with you, life strategies you can use down the road. Above James Ryan, Dean of Harvard’s School of Education, offers something else–not answers, but questions, the five essential questions to ask as you move through life. He elaborates on each above:

Bruno Latour’s anthropology of the moderns

 

Lemmen, Georges (Belgian, 1865-1916)

 

 

A reply to Maniglier

 

Jan/Feb 2015, Gunnar Skirbekk

 

An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns – published with the motto: si scires donum Dei (for those who do not know the Holy Scripture, this is John 4.10: ‘if you knew God’s gift’) – is said to be the result of Bruno Latour’s research over the last twenty-five years. [1] The book was presented euphorically in three reviews in Le Monde, comparing Latour with the great philosophers of the past, and, most recently, in an article by Patrice Maniglier published in Radical Philosophy (‘A Metaphysical Turn?, Radical Philosophy 187, September/October 2014), which concludes that ‘Latour has produced what will henceforth stand as one of the great philosophical proposals of our time’. In what follows, I will present a rather different view.

Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person

Chomsky speaking in support of the Occupy movement in 2011

 

April 28th, 2016

 

There may be no more contentious an issue at the level of local U.S. government than education. All of the socioeconomic and cultural fault lines communities would rather paper over become fully exposed in debates over funding, curriculum, districting, etc. But we rarely hear discussions about educational policy at the national level these days.

The hard problem: Tom Stoppard on the limits of what science can explain

Erik Andriesse (Dutch, 1957-1993), Amaryllis, 1992

Can evolution explain acts of kindness, and morality? We arranged a debate between a sceptical Tom Stoppard and the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. Stuart Jeffries acted as referee

In Search of a Philosopher’s Stone

At a remote site in Turkey, archaeologists have found fragments of the ancient world’s most massive inscription

By ERIC A. POWELL

Thursday, June 04, 2015

Pirate Radical Philosophy

Walden Glenn 2008  by Norman Engel

 

RP 173 (May/Jun 2012), Gary Hall

Pirate … from the Latin pirata (-ae; pirate)… transliteration of the Greek piratis (pirate; πειρατής) from the verb pirao (make an attempt, try, test, get experience, endeavour, attack; πειράω). … In modern Greek… piragma: teasing [πείραγμα] …pirazo: tease, give trouble [πειράζω].1