Free Republic

Professor Robert P. George is pacing around a Princeton auditorium before 200-plus undergraduates, preparing to wage an intellectual shock-and-awe campaign against illogical thinking. “Some politicians say that they’re ‘personally opposed’ to abortion, yet ‘pro-choice,’” says the 48-year-old professor of constitutional law and moral philosophy. “But we must ask: Is this a position that can survive the test of logical coherence? After all, if abortion is wrong, surely it is wrong because it is the unjust taking of the life of a developing human being.” He pauses to let that sink in and then launches another question: “And if one believes...

Thinking about the mind Cal philosopher takes a stab at explaining why we have consciousness - Reviewed by Troy Jollimore Sunday, December 19, 2004 Mind A Brief Introduction By John R. Searle OXFORD UNIVERSITY; 326 PAGES; $26 Self-knowledge is difficult, as Socrates and virtually every philosopher since Socrates has pointed out. Of all the subjects into which human beings have chosen to inquire, the most resistant to understanding has turned out to be human beings themselves. Indeed, that we researchers have turned out to be our own most recalcitrant subjects must surely constitute one of the leading ironies of post-Enlightenment...

THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE WITHOUT DUALISM by Elizabeth NewmanBoth modernism's disinterested spectator and postmodernism's deconstructed self lead to the gnostic belief that we are in bondage to the world. Biblically informed myth offers an escape. That theology and science have been haunted by epistemological dualisms is an unremarkable claim. Current postmodern efforts to think beyond such dualisms as objectivism versus relativism include recent attention to knowledge as socially constructed, communitarian, and nonfoundational. Such efforts share the assumption that knowing and doing are internally related. Thus theology and science, like all knowledge, emerge from the practices of concrete, historical communities rather than...

The Undefinable ShadowlandA Study of the Complex Question of Dualism in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the RingsLeif Jacobsen In memory of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, to whom I owe so much The Road ever goes on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow if I can Pursuing it with weary feet, Until it joins some larger way, Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. Introduction "I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the...