Missouri's first State Poet Laureate. Walter Bargen. I can't tell you how pleased I am by this. Walter is a first-rate poet and, just if not more importantly, a decent human being. He will be formally introduced on February 13th at the state capitol. After that, he will serve a…
Edge.org has just released it's Annual Question. This year's version: WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?" I've read a couple dozen answers so far. As always, the answers are intellectually stimulating, challenging to common sense and entertaining. Television producer Karl Sabbagh weighs in this year with his realization that expertise has serious…
I've been long-intrigued by Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. Philip Zimbardo turns that concept on its head in an article from Edge, "The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism." (you'll need to scroll down to the z's). Zimbardo's article appears as one of…
I’m pondering an idea which is certainly not original, though it is an idea powerful enough to make a mockery of any moral system that looks to the consequences of actions to characterize the moral quality of those actions.
Here’s the thought: Every so often something really bad happens to me. I’m in an auto accident. I lose my job. My marriage fails. My children ignore me. Something expensive breaks. Someone I care about dies. My attempts to impress someone important go completely unnoticed. I spend endless hours on a project and it does not turn out the way I had hoped.
Each of these things are the types of things we would easily categorized as “bad.” They are so obviously bad that we can predict that our friends, upon hearing of these things, will console us. But are “bad” things really bad?
After all, while I’m healing from that auto accident, an incredibly important thought occurs to me and I change my life for the “better.” Even though I’ve lost a job I cherished, I then find another job which I like even better. After my marriage fails, I make some changes in my life and I encounter a new love. When my children ignore me, I learned to pay more attention to them and then I benefit from an improved parent-child relationship. That thing that broke is something I didn’t need in my life anyway. The death of my close friend inspires me to be a better person. …
An ad hominem attack occurs when a person attacks the character of a person rather than attacking what that person said. Here’s an example: “Don’t listen to Tommy. He’s a big fat slob.” This argument is not valid because the attack has nothing to do with the content of Tommy’s…