Walt Whitman - Song of Myself

The poetic style of free verse was born from the iconoclastic mind of Walt Whitman, an American poet who embodied the concepts of individualism and defiance to his core.

On the one hand, the invention of free verse made it possible for geniuses such as William Butler Yeats, T.S. Elliot, Wallace Stevens and Thomas Hardy to explore and harvest a fascinating literary space previously uncharted. On the other hand, and because of its apparent lack of constraint, free style may have also marked the slow death and collapse of poetry as a fine art: just look at much of what passes for "poetry" today.

However you may feel about free verse, though, it is hard to deny Walt Whitman's  brilliance, which we get to celebrate today (this being his birthday) with a short excerpt from his famous poem "Song of Myself," read by none other than Darth Va... I mean James Earl Jones

Go ahead and contradict yourself, Walt, it's your birthday :)

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Lucretius - De Rerum Natura - Matter and Void

In his fascinating book, The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt tells the gripping story of the rediscovery, during the Middle Ages, of one of the philosophical masterpieces of the Classical period in Rome: Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), an epic exploration and development of Epicurus' materialist, empiricist and soteriologically hedonistic philosophy, all set to the most beautiful of Latin poetry.

Greenblatt shows how the Christian obsession with asceticism, suffering and self-righteousness came perilously close to annihilating any traces of a philosophy that eschews the supernatural, and that celebrates life and sees it as worth living and enjoying. It was by sheer chance that an Italian humanist scholar, Gian Francesco Poggio, discovered Lucretius in a palimpsest and started circulating it. In Greenblatt's opinion, the dissemination of this beautiful work of antiquity (measured by the famous thinkers who managed to get their hands on and were inspired by it), may have been one of the leading factors that gave rise to modernity.

In the following audio rendition, read by the inimitable Charlton Griffin, you'll get a sense of the piercing power of Lucretius' philosophy and poetry as he sets down the basics of Epicurus' metaphysical materialism and his fight against religion. They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but in Lucretius' hands, it's more like a nuclear bomb!

This is just the beginning... stay tuned for more excerpts from this fascinating work!

And if you're interested in the text of the above excerpt, you can find a copy here.

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Jon Stewart Pwns Bill O'Reilly on Profiling... and Math

We all know that Bill O'Reilly is a petulant, loud-mouth who bullies and yells at people he disagrees with (even when they are invited guests in his show), and it's kind of hilarious to watch him and Rush Limbaugh go at it every now and then, but I'm starting to wonder whether the Jon Stewart vs Bill O'Reilly little debates and repartees are fair... I mean, Papa Bear is like five feet taller, a lot louder, always willing to make up straw man arguments, and overshout everyone... and Jon Stewart, well, he takes the abuse graciously, but also drops an atomic bombshell every now and calls him out on the inconsistency of his bullshit...

Here's just one more example of that ass-kicking:

So, is O'Reilly a masochist or just clueless?

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Dogs vs. Hyenas - Chew On This!

I've never been one to like hyenas. I don't know if I find it ignoble to rely on great numbers to bring down a great beast, or if it's guilt by association, since usually where there's vultures there's probably hyenas (or is it the other way around?), or if their preposterously high levels of testosterone (especially in the females) feels somehow emasculating, or if they're just ugly as all hell... but either way I find them repulsive.

That's not to say, however, that one can't also find them interesting, indeed fascinating. For instance, did you know that hyenas are evolutionarily closer to cats than to dogs? Me either. So what else about these social animals might you not know but could learn in about two minutes?

The idea of convergent evolution could have been stated with even more strength if they had also compared dogs and hyenas to certain marsupials that hit upon the same basic adaptations, quite independently, as things usually happen, Down Under in Australia.

And if you want, there's also a poster:

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Richard Feynman on the Scientific Method

When it comes to backward, mystical, conspiratorial, pseudoscientific thinking, I'm actually pretty forgiving of people in the past: apart from  a small intellectual elite, most people didn't always have the technological and conceptual tools necessary to separate reasonable ideas from the bat-shit crazy. Today, however, when we have such easy access to the accumulated knowledge and wisdom humanity has accrued over the past few thousand years, all of which can be easily accessed through our phones, there is no longer an excuse for science illiteracy. Today, if we are ignorant, much of that is by choice.

By science literacy I'm not talking about keeping up with the details of all the latest studies and experiments published in the latest and most prestigious science journals. I'm talking about a basic understanding of the thinking and methods involved in adjudicating competing claims, whatever their source and whatever their nature. And who better to give you an idea of this kind of thinking, if you're not already familiar with it, than the inimitable and hilarious Richard Feynman? :)

Share with your friends. This is a gospel worth spreading :)

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Sea of Faith - Soren Kierkegaard

Among the many theologians and religious philosophers that have become famous throughout history, the most interesting, enjoyable, thought-provoking and challenging has got to be the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (whose 200th birthday is being celebrated this week).

Wielding Hegel's dialectic method, Kierkegaard set out both to refute Hegel's conclusions, and to simultaneously defend and to problematize the question of faith and the meaning of life.

Apart from Socrates and Nietzsche (the former who invented the concept, the latter who gave it its most paradoxical twist), no other philosopher has epitomized the concept of irony quite so powerfully and masterfully as Kierkegaard.

His thought is sometimes difficult to pin down, partly due to the fact he wrote under a number of symbolic pseudonyms who expressed differing points of view (Johannes de Silentio, Hilarius Bookbinder, Constantin Constantius, Johannes Climacus: total porn nom de plum, by the way), and partly because the dialectic process he embraced is inherently dynamic and ever-changing. Just to give you a small taste of the incredible kind of balancing act he sought to perform, Kierkegaard argued against an increasingly secular public that faith is an immediacy higher than that afforded by reflection and the intelligibility of universal ethical categories. And arguing against maudlin conceptions of faith (all-too-common today), he contended that faith ought to be experienced in the shudder of existential fear and trembling. To strike this balance of a higher existence to be experienced in anguish, Kierkegaard explores the question of whether Abraham was justified in being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac in such a way that, whatever perspective you come from, you can't help both to admire Abraham and to be horrified by him.

But instead of letting me yap endlessly about this master of philosophy, here's a nice introduction to Kierkegaard and his thought, narrated by the influential non-realist (or anti-representationalist) philosopher of religion, Don Cupitt:

Happy birthday, Soren!

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'Science' of the Gaps

If you're not familiar with the logical fallacy of the God of the gaps, here's roughly how it works: there is some phenomenon or process you can't explain (for whatever reason), but instead of being honest about your own lack of understanding, you simply jump to the conclusion that "God did it." In other words, you use God as the "explanation" for the gaps in our knowledge.

Three problems should be immediately obvious. First, you can't just make up an explanation out of thin air. Second, appealing to God doesn't actually explain anything. An explanation requires some sort of mechanism, a how. God may give you a who or a what, or maybe even a why, but definitely not a how, so appealing to God answers the wrong question. And third, as science continues to increase our understanding of the universe, the gaps that you fill in with 'God' gradually become smaller and smaller, and your own God becomes increasingly useless... that's not very pious of you now, is it?

But religion isn't the only attempt to fill in the gaps of our knowledge with made up facile crap. Pseudoscience tries to do exactly the same thing, but with the added perniciousness of pretending to be scientific and trying to capitalize on the intellectual respect that science has earned through centuries of rigorous and systematic research. And just like with cases of parents whose children die because they decided to pray for their children to heal from an ordinary disease instead of taking them to the doctor, pseudoscience can be just as dangerous for similar reasons.


Even without such consequences, however, the main problem with religion and pseudoscience is that they make people credulous and intellectually lazy, hoping for easy answers to solve complicated questions, thereby slowing down real intellectual progress.

In the philosophy of science, there's an important question regarding the line of demarcation between science and pseudoscience. It's a fascinating question, and one for which there is no easy solution, but here's a nice, useful shortcut: if a claim is unfalsifiable (not empirically testable), chances are it's vacuous crap...

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Stephen Colbert - The Word: Medical Leave

As political philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in the past (as in this video and in this article from The Atlantic), when we turn from a market economy to a market society, we have taken a decidedly wrong turn... Instead of valuing people as persons with dignity and worthy of respect and consideration, with goals and projects that may have meaningful, intrinsic, emotional or educational value, we start to see everything (and everyone) around us through money-colored filters, and valuing them only in terms of their economic value: how much money they can contribute to our own financial goals or how much money they're going to cost us; and in the process we rob them of their personhood and humanity.

Stephen Colbert reports on some instances of this downward trend as it applies to hospitals and health-care providers...

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And what does it say about the insane cost of our healthcare system that deporting people overseas on a private plane is cheaper than just taking care of their injuries???

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