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Breaking The Spell (Dennett Book)
''Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon'' is a 2006 book by American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, in which the author argues that religion is in need of scientific analysis so that its nature and future may be better understood. The "spell" that requires "breaking" is not religious belief itself but the belief that it is off-limits to or beyond scientific inquiry. Synopsis The book is divided into three parts. Dennett's working definition of religions is: "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought". He notes that this definition is "a place to start, not something carved in stone". Part I Part I discusses the motivation and justification for the entire project: ''Can'' science study religion? ''Should'' science study religion? Part II After answering in the affirmative, Part II proceeds to use the tools of evolutionary biology and memetics to suggest possible theor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel C
The Wake are a British post-punk, synth-pop and later indie pop band, formed in Glasgow in 1981 by Gerard "Caesar" McInulty (formerly of Altered Images), Steven Allen (drums) and Joe Donnelly (bass), the latter replaced by Bobby Gillespie. Steven's sister Carolyn Allen also joined on keyboards, and remained in the band thereafter. Gillespie left the band in 1983, replaced by Martin Cunning and then by Alexander 'Mac' Macpherson. History The Wake released their first single on their own Scan 45 label, coupling together "On Our Honeymoon" and "Give Up". This single eventually caught the attention of New Order (band), New Order manager Rob Gretton, who helped the band sign to Factory Records in 1982 and record an LP (''Harmony (The Wake album), Harmony'') at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. This was followed by a number of singles on Factory and its Belgian sister label Factory Benelux. In 1983, The Wake toured with New Order (band), New Order, and thus received critical attention ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Empirical
Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law. There is no general agreement on how the terms ''evidence'' and ''empirical'' are to be defined. Often different fields work with quite different conceptions. In epistemology, evidence is what justifies beliefs or what determines whether holding a certain belief is rational. This is only possible if the evidence is possessed by the person, which has prompted various epistemologists to conceive evidence as private mental states like experiences or other beliefs. In philosophy of science, on the other hand, evidence is understood as that which ''Scientific method#Confirmation, confirms'' or ''disconfirms'' Hypothesis#Scientific hypothesis, scientific hypotheses and arbitrates ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Feser
Edward C. Feser (; born April 16, 1968) is an American Catholic philosopher. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. Education Feser holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara, an M.A. in religion from the Claremont Graduate School, and a B.A. in philosophy and religious studies from the California State University at Fullerton. His thesis is titled "Russell, Hayek, and the Mind-Body Problem". He also went to Crespi High School in California. Career Feser is an associate professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College and has been a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and a visiting scholar at Bowling Green State University's Social Philosophy and Policy Center. Called by ''National Review'' "one of the best contemporary writers on philosophy," Feser is the author of ''On Nozick'', ''Philosophy of Mind'', ''Locke'', ''The Last Superstition: A Refutation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (; born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher. He is the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University, where he taught from 1980 to 2016. His main areas of philosophical interest are legal philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics. Nagel is known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay " What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to liberal moral and political theory in ''The Possibility of Altruism'' (1970) and subsequent writings. He continued the critique of reductionism in ''Mind and Cosmos'' (2012), in which he argues against the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness. Life and career Nagel was born on July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), to German Jewish refugees Carolyn (Baer) and Walter Nagel. He arrived in the US in 1939, and was raised in and around New York. He had no religious upbringing, but regards himself as a Jew. N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New Atlantis (journal)
''The New Atlantis'' is a journal founded by the social conservative advocacy group the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In January 2018, it became independent of EPPC; it is now published by the Center for the Study of Technology and Society. The journal covers topics about the social, ethical, political, and policy dimensions of modern science and technology. It is not peer reviewed. The journal is published in Washington, D.C. by the Center for the Study of Technology and Society. It is edited by Ari Schulman, having previously been edited by co-founders Eric Cohen and Adam Keiper. The journal's name is taken from Francis Bacon's utopian novella ''New Atlantis'', which the journal's editors describe as a "fable of a society living with the benefits and challenges of advanced science and technology." An editorial in the inaugural issue states that the aim of the journal is "to help us avoid the extremes of euphoria and despair that new technologies too often arouse; and to help u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles T
Charles is a masculine given name predominantly found in English and French speaking countries. It is from the French form ''Charles'' of the Proto-Germanic name (in runic alphabet) or ''*karilaz'' (in Latin alphabet), whose meaning was "free man". The Old English descendant of this word was '' Ċearl'' or ''Ċeorl'', as the name of King Cearl of Mercia, that disappeared after the Norman conquest of England. The name was notably borne by Charlemagne (Charles the Great), and was at the time Latinized as ''Karolus'' (as in ''Vita Karoli Magni''), later also as '' Carolus''. Some Germanic languages, for example Dutch and German, have retained the word in two separate senses. In the particular case of Dutch, ''Karel'' refers to the given name, whereas the noun ''kerel'' means "a bloke, fellow, man". Etymology The name's etymology is a Common Germanic noun ''*karilaz'' meaning "free man", which survives in English as churl (< Old English ''ċeorl''), which developed its depr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Environmentalism
Environmentalism or environmental rights is a broad philosophy, ideology, and social movement regarding concerns for environmental protection and improvement of the health of the environment, particularly as the measure for this health seeks to incorporate the impact of changes to the environment on humans, animals, plants and non-living matter. While environmentalism focuses more on the environmental and nature-related aspects of green ideology and politics, ecologism combines the ideology of social ecology and environmentalism. ''Ecologism'' is more commonly used in continental European languages, while ''environmentalism'' is more commonly used in English but the words have slightly different connotations. Environmentalism advocates the preservation, restoration and improvement of the natural environment and critical earth system elements or processes such as the climate, and may be referred to as a movement to control pollution or protect plant and animal diversity. Fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientism
Scientism is the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality. While the term was defined originally to mean "methods and attitudes typical of or attributed to natural scientists", some scholars (and subsequently many others) also adopted it as a pejorative term with the meaning "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)". Overview With respect to the philosophy of science, the term ''scientism'' frequently implies a critique of the more extreme expressions of logical positivism and has been used by social scientists such as Friedrich Hayek, philosophers of science such as Karl Popper, and philosophers such as Mary Midgley, the later Hilary Putnam, and Tzvetan Todorov to describe (for example) the dogmatic endorsement of scientific methods and the reduction of all knowledge to only that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jewish Review Of Books
The ''Jewish Review of Books'' is a quarterly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs from a Jewish perspective. It is published in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The magazine was launched in 2010 with an editorial board that included Michael Walzer and Ruth Wisse, Shlomo Avineri, Ruth Gavison, and other prominent Jewish thinkers.Smith, Jordan Michael"A Jewish Journal of Ideas Is Born" ''The Forward'', February 10, 2010 (issue of February 19, 2010). The editor is Abraham Socher, who took a leave of absence from his position as Chair of Jewish Studies at Oberlin College to found the magazine. The initial press run was 30,000 copies. According to ''The Jewish Week'', the JRB is "unabashedly" modeled after the venerable ''New York Review of Books''. Harvey Pekar and Tara Seibel collaborated on comic strips for the first two issues of the magazine. The magazine was initially funded by the Tikvah Fund, founded by Zalman Bernstein. In 2022, the publication separat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltier (; born June 14, 1952) is an American critic and magazine editor. From 1983 to 2014, he was the literary editor of ''The New Republic''. He was a contributing editor and critic at ''The Atlantic'' until October 27, 2017, when the magazine fired him following multiple allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct. He is currently the editor of ''Liberties.'' Life and career Wieseltier was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Stella (Backenroth) and Mark Wieseltier, who were Holocaust survivors from Poland. He attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush, Columbia University, Oxford University, and Harvard University. He was a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows (1979–82). During his tenure as literary editor of ''The New Republic'', Wieseltier played a central role in the increased stature of its "back of the book" or literary, cultural and arts pages, which he edited. The magazine's owner, Marty Peretz discovered Wieseltier, then working at Harvard's Society of Fel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Freeman Dyson
Freeman John Dyson (15 December 1923 – 28 February 2020) was an English-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and engineering. He was Professor Emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Dyson originated several concepts that bear his name, such as Dyson's transform, a fundamental technique in additive number theory, which he developed as part of his proof of Mann's theorem; the Dyson tree, a hypothetical genetically engineered plant capable of growing in a comet; the Dyson series, a perturbative series where each term is represented by Feynman diagrams; the Dyson sphere, a thought experiment that attempts to explain how a spacefaring, space-faring civilization would meet its energy requirements with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Johnson (writer)
George Johnson (born January 20, 1952) is an American journalist and science writer. Work Johnson is the author of nine books, including ''The Cancer Chronicles'' (2013), ''The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments'' (2008) and ''Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics'' (1999), and writes for a number of publications, including ''The New York Times''. He is a two-time winner of the science journalism award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His books have been short-listed three times for the Royal Society science book prize. His column, "Raw Data", appears in ''The New York Times''. Johnson is one of the co-hosts (with science writer John Horgan) of "Science Faction", a weekly discussion on the website Bloggingheads.tv, related to topics in science. Several prominent scientists, philosophers, and bloggers have been interviewed for the site. Awards His ninth book ''The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mys ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
