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Glossary of free-will debate terms
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How to subscribe to LDS-Herm. An LDS theology and continental philosophy mailing list.
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Economics and utilitarianism
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The new Philosopher's Carnival is up.
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On the Null set
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The book Shopping for God and Mormonism. Interesting discussion in the comments.
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FPR on John's account of Christmas is Revelation. I bring up 1 Ne 11 which is tied to Rev 12.
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FPR on Myth analysis and Mormonism. I tend to take the poststructuralist skepticism although I confess I have a lot of myth-criticism books on my shelf.
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Against Evolutionary Psychology explanations of women with narrow waists and big hips. EP in my view oversimplifies things and produces "just so" explanations. I honestly can't figure out why they are so popular in the press.
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Should cousins be banned from marrying? Would anyone want to anymore? For some reason I always think of rural areas where people have lived stably for a long time with little outflow or inflow of populations. Where is that true now?
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Razib on the follies of economics. I don't know enough to say much beyond noticing that many economic majors have horrible math skills. Not all do of course. But when math is such a big part of modeling it always left me with heavy skepticism towards the profession. Undoubtedly unfairly so since there are many very well versed in math and statistics. I'm also skeptical of the "rational actor" model that is behind so much.
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... the production of spontaneous facial expressions of emotion is not dependent on observational learning but simultaneously demonstrates a learned component to the social management of expressions... (HT: Gene Expression) Not that surprising all things considered. I suspect most human phenomena ends up being about 50-50 learned vs. wired. But there's still a lot of folks who push the nurture basis way too much.
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Happiness and those around you. Argues your happiness doesn't depend upon your friends.
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Reading Burn After Reading. Coen meet Freud.
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Public vs. Public Morality
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Vallicella on Eliminative Materialism. Also see his post on what Eliminative Materialism is.
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Richard refutes Anselm. I think just thinking through all the ways to refute the ontological argument are interesting. It's an excellent problem to think through. I like Kant's existence is not a property approach best. Marion also has a discussion about whether the ontological argument is ontological at all. I'm not sure I agree with Marion (on numerous things) but it is interesting.
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Far Side reenactments (HT: BCC)
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What is the Mormon answer to the meaning of life? I always took us as more Nietzschean than Utilitarian. That is I think happiness isn't the meaning of life but merely something we obtain while pursuing it.
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Nauvoo polygamy. Fantastic discussion that made me reconsider several things. (Although the trolls come in after a while) Also a the earlier post on the same which has some great comments as well.
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FPR on the Divine Council in Hebrew literature.
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Brains and spirituality. Or why discovering cognitive units for spirituality should be expected and not be shocking to the religious person.
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Intuitions of free will. Not at all unexpectedly different people have different intuitions.
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The Sorites paradox and non-standard arithmetic. Great post. This issue of vagueness is one of my favorite philosophical topics.
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Volokh makes the case that voters of both parties are ignorant. The scariest thing about our democracy is how elections are rarely decided on the issues.
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More Entries

Defining God

Sorry for the delay in posts folks. Things got busy. In the meantime Enowning had a great little quote from a blog on God and Heidegger.

Reading Club: Ostler 2 - My Views

Someone asked about my view of the Godhead so as to better understand the Ostler Reading club and my comments. Of course we all have biases and the most pernicious ones are the ones we may not be consciously aware of. So let me answer this a bit.

Reading Club: Ostler 1

OK, this is the first in the long delayed Ostler reading club. The book is Blake Ostler’s Exploring Mormon Thought: Of God and Gods. This is the third in Blake’s series on Mormon theology. It’s also quite different from the two that went before in that it is less about formal philosophy. [...]

Spore & The Royal Society: Teaching Evolution

OK, I’m late to this one. But a lot of people are talking about the game Spore. I don’t have the game although I’m thinking about downloading the iPhone version of the game. The problem is that the game was hyped as if it were teaching evolution. Yet, it seems to [...]

LDS Philosophy Blogs

Just a note on some Mormon philosophy blogs. I keep meaning to mention them.

Ostler Reading Club: Of God and Gods

I’d mentioned a little while ago about the plan to do a reading club on Blake’s newest book Exploring Mormon Thought: On God and Gods. I’ve read the first two chapters which are quite good. I hope others - especially those with blogs - decide to comment on it. I know several of [...]

The Problem of Evil and Wanting to Not Get What You Want

Over at Crooked Timber earlier this month there was an interesting point about how sometimes we want to not get what we want. The example the author used was not wanting ones football team to always win so there was a bit of excitement, suspense and challenge. I think this ends up being [...]

Best of the Week 6: Academic LDS

(Whoops, sorry about that old header - my bad) Here’s this week’s “best of” for more academic oriented posts on Mormon topics. I’ve found there’s just so many blogs out there now and most tend to post of fluff (IMO). There are always a few blogs that go after the more technical [...]

Mormons and Pelegianism

Pelegianism is a topic that often comes up (especially from critics) regarding Mormonism. While I think philosophers like Sterling McMurrin vastly overstate the degree of Pelgianism in Mormonism I suspect that if you asked most Mormons a series of common questions most would tend towards Pelagian answers. Of course one problem is that [...]

Best of the Week 5: Academic LDS

Hey, I’m doing better. It was only a week and a half this time since my last best of. There are a ton this time though. I’ll try breaking them up by theme a bit more.

Misc: Reading Club on Ostler

Just a few various short notes.
First off my copy of Blake’s third volume of Exploring Mormon Thought arrived. I gather there were a bunch of publishing problems including a large recall by the publisher due to bad bindings. Amazon still doesn’t sell it for some reason but they have a few [...]

Best of the Week 4: Academic LDS

OK, I sort of went a month without doing this after saying it was going to be a weekly thing. Oops. But here’s me playing catchup. These probably aren’t quite as complete as they could be. But they are the ones that caught my memory.

Responsibility, Ignorance and our Duty

Sorry to keep harping on the free will debate. I know some aren’t interested. I should have some other posts coming as well as the much promised post on revisionist accounts of responsibility. I sort of wanted to get a lot of this out of my system so I could think about [...]

Truth vs. Truth

I was listening to Dreyfus’ existentialism lectures on my drive home. He was discussing the two traditions that make up the western tradition. The first was Greek and basically was what we’d term absolutism and the traditional categories of philosophical thought (epistemology, ethics, ontology). In that tradition truth is correspondence between thought [...]

Mormon Free Will Redux

I’ve not posted on free will for a while. (My last main posts were on responsibility and foreknowledge, time and chance, and then Mele II) Over at New Cool Thang there was a discussion about free will that got me thinking about it again.
So let me summarize some of the conclusions I’ve reached [...]

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