Since I'm on a graphics kick these days and I'm annoyed by argument, I thought I'd join the two. Going through the archives, and making it official with a new tag:
Make it Idiot-Proof.





Philip Roth is a practitioner of philosophical naturalism. Alex Rosenberg is an academic and a professor of a minor branch of the minor school of late 20th century scholastic philosophy.

Physicalism denies free will; it does not therefore undermine itself, only the arrogance of those who profess it. I'm a humanist because I choose to be for all the very logical reasons described below and elsewhere, or, following physicalism, because I have no choice. Read Rosenberg's arguments for every example where he lets manifestations of "enchantment" slide by unacknowledged. It's not as directly offensive as Steven Weinberg's arguments from 19th century racism and empire but it shares the same foundation. Weinberg:

As I say in the article, one of the things that makes me sympathetic to Zionism is that it represents the intrusion of a democratic, scientifically sophisticated, secular culture into a part of the world that for centuries had been despotic, technically backward, and obsessed with religion.

As Rosenberg writes at his #8:"History Is Bunk." No doubt Weinberg agrees. Platonists and rationalists are more put off by empiricism than imperialism, but good colonial administrators are empiricists and political realists. Idealists, moral realists, by and large stay home.

The level of academic anti-intellectualism these days just stuns me.