Saturday, March 12, 2011

Some Links

* Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistani minister for minorities, was recently martyred; the local bishops are considering whether to begin the process for recognizing him as such officially.

* Christopher Blosser has pulled together many of the major moments of the debate on lying that took up so much of February. The dispute has at times become acrimonious, and I am thoroughly unimpressed with some of the arguments that were made, but, frankly, overall it shows just how much there is to the Catholic blogosphere: there is probably no other part of the blogosphere that is at once so large, so diverse, and yet in which everyone involved, regardless of their background, is capable of sharing such a philosophically rich heritage, that it could sustain an intellectual discussion of ethics with this extent and depth.

* Speaking of which, Tom also had a good round-up. (You can find GoogleTranslate's English version here.)

* I am 100% in agreement with Eric Schliesser on philosophy here. I've discussed the Santayana book before, and looked at some ways we can genuinely learn from literature, and discussed Wordsworth as a philosophical poet (also here).

* Errol Morris has an amusing story about how Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at his head. Although the question about incommensurability would have made me groan, too; it's remarkable how people don't recall their basic geometry in trying to figure out what it means. (It is much the same in his Part II, where he picks out, from all the criticisms of Kuhn, the least intelligent criticisms of incommensurability, the ones that involve an inability or failure or refusal to see the distinction between "unable to be compared" and "unabled to be measured using exactly the same terms.") Daniel looks at a related issue in Morris's Part III.