As far as I can recall, I never heard of Douglas Gasking before this week. Apparently, a lot of other people haven’t heard of him either, because he doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page, GASP AND EGAD! All he gets over there is an in-passing mention under “Melbourne Philosophy” in the Australian philosophy entry, …
Let’s plunge into today’s reflection via a quote from Our Fearless Final Guru: “In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues that pure reason cannot give us answers to questions regarding such metaphysical questions as the existence of God, because pure reason can be used to justify various opposing positions. It’s not that we can’t make claims …
GREETINGS AND SALUTATIONS. After yesterday’s brief interlude, I’m back on the regularly scheduled AfL…um…STUFF. Next up is J.L. (John Leslie) Mackie, an analytic philosopher I’d never heard of until this year’s AfL. (Although it’s possible I came across him in my previous two incomplete attempts at AfL in ’19 and ’20, I just don’t remember.) …
I shared these thoughts with the AfL group and thought it might be useful to record them here and expand them slightly. At this point in my life, I consider myself an a/theist living “in the slash” between the two. I believe and I don’t believe. I hold both attitudes/orientations/mindsets gently and loosely, so I …
Today we’re studying David Hume, who wrote a thing his friends thought would be so incendiary and divisive, they told him he shouldn’t let it out into the world until after he was dead. His nephew, David Hume the Younger, finally published it in 1779, three years after Hume the Elder’s death. AND, initially, it …
Hidey-ho, inklings, travelers, various, and sundry! Welcome back to Atheism for Lent, the annual Lenten practice of destabilization and decentering hosted by Dr. Peter Rollins, Irish philosopher and author. Today we’re delving more deeply into arguments against the existence of God by way of Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and …
Today we are turning to various arguments against the existence of God, starting with those of one Antony Flew, an historically fairly recent English philosopher (1923-2010). Flew was an atheist for most of his life, and he insisted that the burden of proving God’s existence lies on the believer, not that the burden of disproving God’s …
I’m a day behind, so this is the first of two posts I’ll make today. The second will be “day 6.” Today’s reflection from Dr. Peter Rollins recaps the past week, during which we looked at the three main categories of argument for the existence of God: cosmological, teleological, and ontological. cosmological: arguing from the …
Bonjour, mes amis! Aujourd’hui, nous étudierons le philosophe français René Descartes. And I didn’t even have to use a dictionary for most of that! Thank you, my 1990s-era French studies. Good ol’ Renny is one of those writers who makes me wanna take a red pen to all his texts. At least in English. I …