Posted by Anja on November 27th, 2009
Posted by Anja on June 17th, 2008
Ask A Philosopher has received its first question. Yeah!:
I enjoy reading novels, but I have often wondered, what is the purpose of reading fiction? Yes, in general it is because it gives people enjoyment, but why?
This is a great question and I do have some general thoughts that might be helpful in answering it.
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Posted by Anja on April 20th, 2008
During his recent visit to the States, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the priest sex scandal of the U.S. Catholic Church and pointed out that the moral breakdown of society is at least partly to blame. Pedophilia, he argued, is a symptom of overall decrepit sexual mores.
Indeed, it is not as though the moral code of the Catholic Church, especially pertaining to priests and sex, is just impossible to practice because it fundamentally goes against human nature.
Posted by Anja on March 6th, 2008
Jacob Sullum reports on the Atlasphere that:
The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that drug offenders account for about 25 percent of local jail inmates, 21 percent of state prisoners and 55 percent of federal prisoners. Since 1980 the number of drug offenders in state prisons has increased by 1,200 percent, more than four times the increase in violent offenders. … According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, however, only one in ten federal crack offenses involves violence or the threat of violence. … Research conducted by criminologist John DiIulio, economist Anne Morrison Piehl, and sociologist Bert Useem in the late 1990s found that many, if not most, people sentenced for drug crimes in New York, Arizona, and New Mexico were “drug-only offenders,” meaning the only crimes they’d ever committed involved the voluntary exchange of politically incorrect intoxicants for money.
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Posted by Anja on September 18th, 2007
It has been revealed, the male brain! I am particularly astonished by the size of the toilet aiming cell and the listening particle. Are they really that big? And why are there two separate areas for sex? For comparison, here is the female brain. It is interesting that the need for commitment hemisphere and the shopping area are so close together while indecision area is far removed from the shopping area. I suppose more scientific data will confirm or disconfirm those precise locations. And where is the nagging realm?
Posted by Anja on August 14th, 2007
I don’t. And in case you are trying to skip those dreaded footnotes, think again. You may be missing out. Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents contains some of the most hilarious footnotes of all time. To sample, here is one on the control of fire.
“If we go back far enough, we find that the first acts of civilization were the use of tools, the gaining of control over fire, and the construction of dwellings. Among these, the control of fire stands out as a quite extraordinary and unexampled achievement…. Psycho-analytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to clear interpretation, nevertheless admits of a conjecture – a fantastic-sounding one – about the origins of this human feat. It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came into contact with fire, of satisfying the infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upward. Putting out the fire by micturating – a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark back – was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire.” (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, translated by James Strachey, Norton: 1930/1984, p. 42-43)
I have to go now. I think my guy friends are trying to put out the fire in my fireplace again. Damn primal urges!
Lecture 01: The Role of Philosophy
