John Calvin: 500

I was looking around the website set up to commemorate 500 years of Calvin. There is some interesting stuff there including a quiz. Check it out here. I got 9/10, though this was mostly due to some lucky guesses.


More about John Calvin at Calvin 500

Publication: Toleration versus Tolerance

The Autumn edition of Policy was released online yesterday with my name on the front cover. Incidentally it also had the article I wrote inside. Check it out here. Very cool.

Quote: "...the addition of impunity..."

I have a bit of a leaning to pacifism or anarchism - I am not really sure which. Anyway this quote from St. Augustine's The City of God struck a cord.

"Justice being taken away... what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because that reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity."

- St. Augustine, The City of God, book IV.

Quote: "...pessimism..."

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"But if we are indeed in as bad a state as I take us to be, pessimism too will turn out to be one cultural luxury that we shall have to dispense with in order to survive these hard times."

- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Pessimism can be a bit like a kid's blanky, especially when things are going bad. Something to hold on to. Everything can fall to pieces but at least you don't get disappointed and perhaps even some satisfaction from discovering that you where right.

Web Stuff: A Short Essay by Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan's essay "How I Trumped Rudolf Steiner and
Overcame the Tribulations of Illiteracy,
One Snickers Bar at a Time" can be found here.

Paradoxes: 1. Zeno's Famous Tortoise Chase

I find paradoxes really entertaining. They make me think in new ways about reasoning, the way I understand the world and the way we use language. What is a paradox? Well the old definition is that it is something 'beyond belief' or 'contrary belief'. It uses the same Greek root as 'orthodox' - meaning 'right belief'. Apparently it used to be applied more to things in the natural world that were just really weird. The platypus is an example of such a paradox. A duck-billed, egg laying, mammal that nursed its young was, for many Europeans, simply beyond belief (so it was named Ornithorhynchus paradoxus).

These days we just seem to accept that science and nature are weird and don't really make sense and so reserve 'paradoxes' for logical contradictions. You could say that a paradox is a true contradiction. Start with an obvious truth and then discover another obvious truth that seems to directly contradict the first - and you have a paradox. Here is an example:

Zeno's Paradox
Dan had a lot of fun with this problem here, and here. I remember there was even a facebook group dedicated to the 'nood turtle olympiad' implied by the paradox.

My plan for the next few months is to outline some of the more interesting paradoxes that have come up in philosophy over the years and think a bit about what they mean for our understanding of the world and the use and limits of reason and logic. Should be fun.

Web Stuff: Arts & Letters Daily

Arts & Letters Daily is a great little site that each day collects up just a couple of the best articles, book reviews, and opinion pieces from newspapers and journals right across the world wide web. Apart from the fact that the articles are usually really interesting they introduce you to papers and journals around the world that you might not have heard of otherwise.

There is usually a good variety of points of view displayed in the choices of articles. However, as I have only be looking for a month or so though so I would have to say that for me the jury is still out as to A&LD's bias or agenda. What I can say though is that if you like ideas and thinking about stuff you will usually find something to pique you interest.


http://www.aldaily.com/