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,...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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