Suffer Little Children

There's been a lot of articles recently from people like Colin Tudge and John Gray saying that religious believers are caricatured by atheists, and that they don't believe the things they say they do. Perhaps, but how do they behave? Do they act as if magic happens, for example? The Kingdom Faith Church is an evangelical...

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The Problem of Consciousness

Susan Blackmore's excellent Conversations on Consciousness (recommended by my friend Quine, I think) documents a number of chats she has had with eminent researchers on the subject over the years. The strength of the book for a layman like me is the conversational approach. No doubt this isn't appropriate for peer review papers,...

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Abuse and Positive Liberty

Isaiah Berlin famously made the distinction between negative and positive liberty in his essay Two Concepts of Liberty, which he delivered in a lecture at Oxford University in 1958. It seems plain to me that totalitarianism had been much on his mind (and why not!) and he wanted to show how some forms of liberty could be abused. It's...

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