In a recent review of Alain de Botton‘s Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, John Gray writes: Rarely mentioned in the debates of recent years is that atheism has been linked with all kinds of positions in ethics, politics and philosophy. More particularly, there is no necessary connection – either [...]
All posts in category Language
Atheism is no excuse for skipping church
Posted by acilius on February 22, 2012
http://losthunderlads.com/2012/02/22/atheism-is-no-excuse-for-skipping-church/
Gettier cases in real life
It strikes me that I left something important out of a post I put up the other day, the one titled “Justified True Belief.” In it, I summarized Edmund L. Gettier’s 1963 article “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” an article that was less than three pages long to begin with, so it was a bit [...]
Posted by acilius on December 16, 2011
http://losthunderlads.com/2011/12/16/gettier-cases-in-real-life/
Justified True Belief
There are a couple of passages where Plato seems to define knowledge as “justified true belief.” So, if you have enough evidence that you have a right to accept a given proposition as true, if you do in fact exercise this right and accept that proposition as true, and if it so happens that the [...]
Posted by acilius on December 14, 2011
http://losthunderlads.com/2011/12/14/justified-true-belief/
The History of English in Ten Minutes
Here’s something funny that was produced for the Open University this summer. Everyone else has been posting it this week, I decided to join the herd.
Posted by acilius on November 28, 2011
http://losthunderlads.com/2011/11/28/the-history-of-english-in-ten-minutes/
A proposed definition of “feminism”
I teach at a state university deep in the interior of the USA. The other day I was grading some papers students had written about ancient Greek culture. One student focused on women’s clothing in ancient Sparta. She included a paragraph starting with the famous phrase “I’m not a feminist, but…” In her case, she’s [...]
Posted by acilius on October 20, 2011
http://losthunderlads.com/2011/10/20/a-proposed-definition-of-feminism/
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”
The other day, I was eating an apple for breakfast. My wife mentioned that a friend of ours was planning to stop by our house later that morning. This friend is a medical doctor by occupation; I joked that I’d better stop eating the apple, since I didn’t want to keep him away. Recognizing the [...]
Posted by acilius on October 6, 2011
http://losthunderlads.com/2011/10/06/an-apple-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away/
What matters in life
Here are the last three sentences of an opinion piece that appeared in Time magazine some time ago: It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status [...]
Posted by acilius on October 5, 2011
http://losthunderlads.com/2011/10/05/what-matters-in-life/
Charitable speech
Today’s xkcd: The late philosopher H. Paul Grice tried to make some of these rules explicit; his most famous attempt to do this can be found in his essay “Logic and Conversation,” published in his book Studies in the Way of Words (Harvard U.P., 1989 and 1991, pages 22-40.) Grice there lays down a set [...]
Posted by acilius on August 31, 2011
http://losthunderlads.com/2011/08/31/charitable-speech/
Before Babel?
Fotb Maggie Jochild has reminded us of a study that was published in Science in April and publicized in The New York Times. Biologist Quentin D. Atkinson applied mass comparison methods familiar in genetic research to the analysis of phonemes, the sounds that languages use to distinguish one word from another. If a geneticist found [...]
Posted by acilius on August 15, 2011
http://losthunderlads.com/2011/08/15/before-babel/
We’re still here
Hmm, been a bit of a hiatus since the last post. But we’re still here. Here are a couple of links to interesting things: Andrew Gelman has redesigned his blog; same material, but a fresher look and you no longer have to go through the back door to link to individual posts. A couple of [...]
Posted by acilius on July 21, 2011
http://losthunderlads.com/2011/07/21/were-still-here/
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