My beloved laptop–the one I’ve blogged on since starting college–is dying. I thought it was gone at one point, because I tried to start it up and got some weird error screen instead, but then I shut it down and started it up again OK. But that’s happened a couple times since. So this morning, [...]
Monthly Archives: November 2008
Standard Atheist Thanksgiving Post
Posted by Chris Hallquist on November 28, 2008
3 comments
If you’re the sort of atheist who reads lots of atheist literature, you’ve probably read a post like this one before. Still, I believe this post should be at least slightly less cliched than most Thanksgiving reflections, and I hope people find some of the specifics amusing and informative. So: the standard thing on Thanksgiving [...]
John F. Haught’s God and the New Atheism
Posted by Chris Hallquist on November 25, 2008
3 comments
Though I’m setting this post to go up on a Tuesday afternoon, I’m actually writing it late at night, so I’ll keep my comments on the book short: (1) It’s odd how Haught lumps all the New Atheists together, and doesn’t even seem to much acknowledge Sam Harris’ main claim, that Al-Queda and related groups [...]
Wittgensteinism meets Darwinism
Posted by Chris Hallquist on November 24, 2008
2 comments
I seem to have caught a philosophy of language bug recently. The motivation is this: many very puzzling things that people say seem to serve a definite purpose. What initially seems to be incoherent ideological cant, arising from mere confusion, turns out to be superficially incoherent ideological cant that serves a clear purpose in signaling [...]
Oxen
Posted by Chris Hallquist on November 19, 2008
11 comments
An e-mail I recently sent to my philosophy of language prof: Dr. Sidelle, A philosophy language question that’s been bothering me: What do we make of the sentence “A castrated bull is not a bull but an ox.” It seems true at first glance, but it also seems that any sentence of the form “Some [...]