A valiant stand on science and religion
by Luke Rodgers on April 3, 2011
Eventually, someone, somewhere had to stand up for a politician’s right to ignorance.
I for one applaud Canada’s federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, Gary Goodyear for refusing to answer reporters questions regarding his belief in evolution. Such conversations are indeed “not worth having.” The personal beliefs of a politician are simply irrelevant to his or her ability to successfully manage public affairs.
We have seen this amply demonstrated already by the Canadian federal conservatives in their succession of Minsters of the Environment, none of whom know the least thing about environmental science nor care a whit for sustainability, yet who have all excelled in their ability to run a tight ship.
Whether Goodyear “believes in science” is a total red herring. Goodyear could be a voodoo-practicing astrology columnist who tries to convert humours into gold on the weekends for all I care. The role of government is simply the bureaucratic allotment of resources to the right people at the right time, an entirely neutral science, which depends not at all for its success upon concrete knowledge of the issues concerned.
I actually think Goodyear erred in referring to his chiropractic expertise as providing him with a scientific knowledge of the body. To re-iterate, the man’s understanding of science is neither here nor there. All that matters is that his reasoning is sound, and this was amply attested by his grasp of the fact that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack:
“I do believe that just because you can’t see it under a microscope doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It could mean we don’t have a powerful enough microscope yet. So I’m not fussy on this business that we already know everything. … I think we need to recognize that we don’t know.”
Goodyear is clearly referring to our current and lamentable inability to see God in a microscope. It is my private hope that some of the funds he oversees will be funneled to those humble and hard-working scientists seeking to achieve this holy grail of microscopy. I will readily admit to being encouraged by this beautiful vision of science and religion working together in the most productive of ways.
Only good can come of this.
Hegel gets colloquial
by Luke Rodgers on March 24, 2011
From page 1174-5, Volume 2 of the Aesthetics, translated by T.M. Knox.
“If a book does not please me, I can lay it aside, just as I can pass by pictures or statues that are not to my taste, and in that case the author always has available more or less the excuse that his book was not written for every Tom, Dick, or Harry.”
A Heidegger Poem??
by Luke Rodgers on November 27, 2010
I came across a short poem that I apparently wrote, I don’t exactly remember when. Presumably it was after the summer of 2002 or 2003 which I think was when I read Heidegger’s Being and Time. Relevant excerpt followed by poem:
the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is–as equipment (Heidegger, Being and Time p. 98).
You simply must spend less time just staring at that hammer-Thing. Really, it’s ghastly
the way you just waste your time watching it,
as if waiting for it to move.
Let me assure you, that hammer-Thing
isn’t going to animate itself and build us a new deck;
it’s not going to just pick itself up and start hammering in those nails:
me into better living,
and you out of a job!
I’m not really sure what I was thinking when I wrote this, nor what it exactly means to hammer oneself out of a job.
I recall writing some poetry based on Leibniz and possibly also Malebranche at one point. If I find it I will share.
Some Philosophical Chuck Norris Facts
by Luke Rodgers on November 25, 2010
Chuck Norris can imagine a chiliagon.
Chuck Norris has intellectual intuition.
Chuck Norris threatened Alexandre Kojeve into conceding that history wasn’t over until Chuck Norris said it was.
After watching one episode of Walker: Texas Ranger, Nietzsche changed his concept of “the will to power” to simply “Chuck Norris”. A lost revision to Thus Spoke Zarathustra has the progression camel, lion, baby, Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris can get outside of language and the text.
Hobbes had to rewrite Leviathan after Chuck Norris roundhoused him until he promised to remove the line “No man is so strong that he cannot be killed by the cunning of one man or the strength of many in alliance”. The new edition had an image of Chuck Norris on the cover.
Everything you know only by description, Chuck Norris knows by acquaintance.
Chuck Norris can stand in the same river twice.
Chuck Norris overtook Zeno’s tortoise no problem, then roundhoused the turtle into Zeno’s face.
Chuck Norris can stop an infinite regress with his beard.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite abandoned negative theology because he just couldn’t bring himself to write that the Godhead “is not Chuck Norris.”
After Heidegger met Chuck Norris, he agreed that Chuck isn’t thrown: he throws.
When Levinas published Totality and Infinity, Chuck Norris sued him for infringing on the names of his left and right fists. He sued Foucault for Discipline and Punish cuz that’s what Chuck’s legs are called.
It is a little known fact that Lacan occasionally used “Chuck Norris” as a synonym for the Name of the Father.
When Chuck Norris tells a meta-narrative, everyone believes it.
Chuck Norris can conceive of bare matter without any properties.
When Nietzsche’s demon told Chuck Norris he would live his life over again and again, innumerably, he roundhoused the demon in the face for interrupting him in his loneliest loneliness. The demon called off the eternal recurrence to avoid eternal roundhousing.
Chuck Norris can dispute about taste, and win.
When Parmenides said “ex nihilo nihil fit”, Chuck Norris roundhoused him out of nowhere. Parmenides took it back.
Empedocles developed his concept of atoms “swerving” after he saw Chuck Norris on a motorcycle.
Solon attended Chuck Norris’ baptism, and agreed baby Chuck had achieved eudaimonia at the age of three weeks.
Deleuze and Guatarri actually got the inspiration for the “body without organs” not from Artaud but from watching Chuck Norris kick the crap out General Trau in Missing in Action.
Leibniz recanted his arguments for ours being the “best of all possible worlds” after he learned Chuck Norris wasn’t going to be in Delta Force 3.
Epic Castoriadis run-on sentence
by Luke Rodgers on October 19, 2010
Currently reading Castoriadis’ The Imaginary Institution of Society. The man likes his run-on sentences, as evidenced below. Semi-colons do little to mitigate the sense of being overwhelmed by the piling-up of explications.
The image is therefore a symbol here — but of what? In order to know, one must enter the labyrinths of the symbolic elaboration of the imaginary in the unconscious. What is at the end of it? Something that is not there to represent something else; something that is instead the operative condition for every subsequent representation, but that already itself exists in the mode of representation: the fundamental phantasy of the subject, his or her nuclear (and not ‘primitive’) scene, where that which constitutes the subject in his or her singularity exists; the organizing-organized schema that provides its own image and exists not in symbolization but in the imaginary presentification that is already for the subject an embodied and operative signification, the initial grasp and the first, overall constitution of an articulated, relational system positing, separating and uniting the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, the sketch of gesture and the sketch of perception, the division into archetypal roles and the originary ascription of a role to the subject as such, positive and negative valuation, the source of subsequent symbolic significance, the origin of privileged and specific investments of the subject, something at once structuring and structured.
How does your website fare on text resize?
by Luke Rodgers on August 28, 2010
In the age of page zoom being the default way browsers allow users to increase the size of content on a webpage (standard on most browsers for a while, and on IE since version 7), it can be easy to lump in users who resize text with those using IE6, and unwittingly subject the former to your disregard for IE6. Read the rest of this entry »
Disappointing
by Luke Rodgers on July 25, 2010
