GREY MATTER | THE ECSTATIC TRUTH OF ROMANTIC NEUROSCIENCE
<div>Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts. Otherwise, the Manhattan phone book would be The Book of Books...</div>
<div>Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts. Otherwise, the Manhattan phone book would be The Book of Books...</div>
<div>With the publication of Francis Bacon's 1620 'Novum Organum' ( New Tool)1 there began the Enlightenment march towards the 'singularity'. It entailed a belief in empiricism and scientific knowledge. It began what Francis Fukuyama would label as 'the world's most dangerous idea': Transhumanism...</div>
<div>In 1965 my friend decided to take a day off school and visit the grave of Herman Melville. Melville was just coming back into style as a great American writer, and my friend had become enamored of the nautical world of the novels. Wishing to pay tribute to that great author, and having learned from Melville how important navigation was, he planned his route from Brooklyn to Woodlawn cemetery in the Bronx, and took the train uptown, sure the rest would be easy...</div>
<div>During the Middle Ages, the southern region of Spain, Andalusia, was a magical place. Known as Al-Andalus in Arabic, it was renowned for its religious tolerance, scientific and philosophical advances, orderly, well-lit cities, and splendid architecture, such as the Mosque of Cordoba and the Al Hambra palace. Like its more commercial cousin, California, with which it shares a beneficent Mediterranean climate, the Andalus is remembered as a land of eclectic invention and pluralism...</div>
I once had a conversation in Beijing with a group of Chinese poets who complained about the oppressive weight of writing in a 10,000-year-old literary tradition. They felt the Chinese tradition was hostile, given the great achievements of those 10,000 years, to innovation and new generations of poetry. They were envious of the friendlier, iconoclastic tradition of American poetry, always looking to future writers for innovation and a re-examination of the past. Specifically, we were talking abou
<div>Courts personify the law. In the more grandiloquent accounts of the legal system judges are depicted as its custodians, guardians of its values: sentinels of justice and fair play. They embody fairness, evenhandedness, and impartiality. And an independent judiciary is among the hallmarks of the rule of law. The jurist, Ronald Dworkin, memorably observed that ‘courts are the capitals of law’s empire, and judges are its princes’...</div>
<div>It was not as a student of philosophy that I learned about Edith Stein. The luminous books she wrote as a phenomenologist and a Christian metaphysician did not figure in any of my academic courses. Rather, on my way to work one morning, I chanced across her religious name, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, on a bronze memorial plaque inside Our Lady of Victory Church in downtown Manhattan. Identified as a 'Gift of the Edith Stein Guild,' the plaque stated, 'Her Calvary was Auschwitz.'...</div>
<div>The challenge and reward of formal poetry do not lie in mastery of the formal aspects alone. They certainly are a matter of craftsmanship, but unless they serve a subject, they never amount to artistry. And mastery requires not only achieving the numbers, but achieving them with the appearance of inevitability: without tortured syntax, unnatural diction, and so on...</div>
<div>Many books have been, are, and will be written on the subject of international relations. But not many, at least not today, would discuss international order and our perceptions of it from a political-theological point of view. One of the few titles that offers such a discussion is William Bain's The Political Theology of International Order...</div>
<div>Self-writing clearly appears here in its complementary relation to anchoritism; it offsets the dangers of solitude; it exposes what one has done or thought to a possible gaze; the fact of being obliged to write fills the role of companion by inciting human respect and shame. One can thus posit a primary analogy: that which others are to the ascetic in his community the notebook will be to him in his solitude....</div>
<div>Anyone who’s followed the news for decades has noticed without fail that coverage has tilted more and more towards stories about celebrities and all manner of trivial conflicts between members of the public. What was once the sole domain of what we call 'tabloid' news has spread to become a fixture of most mainstream news outfits....</div>
It’s often said that the first philosopher was Thales of Miletus, born in the 7th century BCE. His big idea was that everything is made of water. In hindsight, this is not such a good idea. Even watermelon is only 92% water. But there’s actually a very profound thought in Thales’ idea. To wit: although the world seems like it’s made of so many different things, of all different colors and shapes and sizes and consistencies, behind this appearance of baffling multiplicity lies a hidden unity. Dee
<div>It was late before I received your letter, wherein you make it your request that I would write something to you concerning the tranquility of the mind, and of those things in the Timaeus which require a more perspicuous interpretation. ...</div>
In the 1996 presidential election campaign, Russian President Boris Yeltsin asked the Russian people to reconstitute themselves as a democratic people with a Western orientation. Since his first election in 2000, current Russian President Vladimir Putin has asked the Russian people to reconsider that identity and to reconstitute themselves once again as a powerful nation with interests distinct from those of the West. He has done this primarily through redefinition of the foundational terms of W
How could any kind of physical processing give rise to any kind of experience, any rich life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. So I like this formulation of the hard problem. It basically presupposes a kind of view of the universe where there is stuff, a kind of materialist starting point, and then asks how and why is consciousness part of that picture? To me, that includes the second version of the way you put it, which is: okay, then how and why is it t
This book is a study of ambitious young Chinese, their aspirations, and career choices. It was prompted by an initial puzzle: how does the Chinese party-state manage to attract recruits and maintain their commitment over time, when ideology does not structure recruitment anymore and a liberalized employment market provides alternative career options? These issues are central to our understanding of what contributes to the long-term resilience of non-democratic regimes and their ability to remain
The Devil has stalked the pages of journalist Randall Sullivan’s and Ed Simon’s books, a whiff of sulfur apparent across the pages of their writing. Both authors have long been concerned with theodicy, with the question of evil; how such misfortune and wickedness is possible in a world created by a benevolent and omnipotent God. Central to that question has been a preoccupation with ultimate evil, the manner in which absolute and metaphysical malignancy has been represented across the Abrahamic
<div>I must admit that I’m not one of those people who’s obsessed by 1960s music, yet I was immediately captivated by The Pieces, which portrays the brief career and mysterious life of a fictional late 1960s British folk singer...</div>
In Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason, Kant posited the existence of a radical evil within the soul and thereby, according to Goethe, 'criminally sullied his philosopher’s cloak with a shameful taint'. He also transformed our whole approach to the problem of evil, whether as an ugly ditch, standing between man and his creator, or the practical problem of surmounting the evil each individual faces in his or her consciousness, in his or her relations with others and his or her world...
The village of the waterwheels, Lao Tzu and a minor epiphany in Moscow all speak of one thing, a glimpse into a future where people are satisfied with less, and yet what is lived is infinitely richer in texture and colour than we often experience today. We will have come full circle from conquering nature, red in tooth and claw, to a return into its heart with more complete knowledge about our purpose here, and the fulness of being a human being. We will be comfortable in our own skin...