I celebrated Buy Something Day–did you?
November 28, 2008 by Chris Hallquist
Filed under IRL, ethics, language, philosophy, social and literary criticism, stupidity
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, [...]
Continue Reading »Standard Atheist Thanksgiving Post
November 28, 2008 by Chris Hallquist
Filed under philosophy, religion
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 day [...]
John F. Haught’s God and the New Atheism
November 25, 2008 by Chris Hallquist
Filed under collecting fleas, language, religion, reviews, stupidity
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 really [...]
Wittgensteinism meets Darwinism
November 24, 2008 by Chris Hallquist
Filed under biology, language, philosophy, science
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 [...]
Continue Reading »Oxen
November 19, 2008 by Chris Hallquist
Filed under language, philosophy
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 members of [...]