In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V scene 1, Miranda says
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
The third line gave Aldous Huxley the title of his future dystopia, Brave New World. Somewhere between Miranda's naive optimism and Huxley's sardonic pessimism lies What sorts of people should there be? a venture by Canadian academics to investigate the effects of the modern world on our sense of self and "to address concerns around human variation, normalcy, and enhancement". They also have a blog. It is run by the illustrious and lustrously hirsute Rob Wilson, an Australian philosopher in exile at the University of Alberta.
Since we're discussing philosophical blogging, go check out the 69th Philosophers' Carnival at Possibly Philosophy. And Sciblings Jason Rosenhouse and James Hrynyshyn get stuck into the incoherent blatherings of David Brooks in the New York Times, in which he seems to argue that we are abandoning the "materialist" view of the mind in favour of a new respect for "spiritual" states (an assertion contrary to all the research I know, at any rate).
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Comments
I wasn't aware 'scientists' had gotten rid of the idea of free will in the first place, let alone that we are inherantly fair or empathic. Does this man have children? Because just on an unjusticied anecdotal note, children very much seem to learn fairness, while 'mine' comes inherantly.
I feel slightly 'straw-manned'...
(Can I verb that? Its all the rage to go around verbing things)
Posted by: Pubcat | May 15, 2008 6:27 PM
I don't know why anyone thinks there's any problem with verbing things. I certainly don't ... as long as you don't do it so often that your writing becomes a whole blungtrop of neologisms. Are there any real arguments against it?
Posted by: Jason Grossman | May 21, 2008 11:07 PM
There's the argument from nounification.
Posted by: John S. Wilkins | May 21, 2008 11:43 PM
There's the argument from nounification.
Shouldn't that be nounifying.
Posted by: Thony C. | May 22, 2008 2:36 AM