http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com Just another WordPress weblog Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:00:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As I argued in part I, scientism—the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—is either self-refuting or trivial.  Moreover, consistently pursued, it leads to the “eliminative materialist” position that the human mind itself is a fiction—that there are no such things as thinking, perceiving, willing, desiring, and so forth.  ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1184 Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science. There is at least a whiff of scientism in the thinking of those who dismiss ethical objections to cloning or embryonic stem cell research ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1174 In his famous critique of the Treaty of Versailles, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), John Maynard Keynes observed: “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency.” History, however, illustrates that the greatest debauchers of money have ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1171 When Russell Kirk wrote about his experiences as a junior professor at Michigan State University, he invariably referred to it as Behemoth State University. Michigan State, my alma mater, was a decent agricultural college grown into a massive research university by a politically adept poultry scientist, John Hannah. ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1158 In a recent book and in a number of interviews, essays, and op-eds, Marc Thiessen has revived discussion of the tactics used by the Bush administration to obtain actionable intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks. The Christmas day arrest of Farouk Abdulmutallab confirms that this is still a live issue: ought ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/02/1161 Despite its growing acceptance, homeschooling continues to come under attack by critics who see it as a fringe phenomenon indulged in only by religious extremists and red-state radicals. The latest of these attacks are two recently published academic papers by Robin West and by Martha Fineman that trumpet concerns about ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/02/1156 Debt is at the heart of the current crisis. On the one hand there’s the debt of households, consumer credit, and mortgages. On the other hand there’s the huge debt levels between financial institutions, and also the debt levels of states that have taken over or guaranteed bad private and ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/02/1152 Late last month, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton lifted a six-year visa ban on the Swiss Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan, an Oxford professor and Europe’s premier voice of reformist Islam, had been prohibited by the Bush administration from entering the U.S. on the grounds that he had given money ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/02/1149 In a recent article for First Things, Paul J. Griffiths takes aim at the notion of natural desires and their supposed role in natural law thinking. According to Griffiths, while human desires were natural before the Fall and will be natural again after the resurrection, for humans suffering from the ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/02/1138 In his State of the Union Message, President Obama called for a repeal of the federal law forbidding open homosexuals from serving in the United States military. As a political matter, his proposal attracted notice as a sign that the president would not try to respond to his party's recent ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/02/1139 The Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding corporate spending on political advocacy—Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—provoked the widespread renewal of a longstanding liberal complaint: namely, that the conservative critique of judicial activism is mere hypocrisy. In this case, it was suggested, conservative justices, applauded by conservative commentators, struck down a ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/02/1135 Result-driven judicial imperialism may soon have a conservative and a liberal version. The United States Supreme Court has granted review in a case this term (McDonald v. City of Chicago) that presents the watershed issue of whether the individual right to bear arms protected under the Second Amendment and established ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/02/1131 Even before Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts on a promise to be the forty-first senator—and thus the decisive vote—against President Obama’s health-care reform plan, the frustrations of the Democrats and their allies in the media had spilled over into new criticism of an old phenomenon in American government: the filibuster ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/01/1129 A New York Times article this past Sunday noted a serious uptick in CIA drone attacks in Pakistan over the last few weeks. Ninety suspected militants have apparently been killed in eleven strikes since Dec. 30, 2009. Yet as the Times also reported, the ACLU and others have voiced concerns ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/01/1126 Many commentators attacked the rhetoric of hope that marked the last presidential election, deploring it as empty and manipulative. But whether they were right or wrong about the uses to which Barack Obama put the word, in Hope in a Democratic Age Alan Mittleman shows that the idea of hope ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/01/1122 It’s not unusual for political and legislative battles in the nation’s capital to be sharply partisan. But even by Washington standards, the health-care debate has been exceptionally contentious and polarizing. The bills that have passed in the House and the Senate are supported almost exclusively by Democrats, and Congressional Republicans ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/01/1112 Muslim leaders of some of the major international Islamic organizations seem to have joined the Swiss population in a competition for who can come up with the most counter-productive approach to building a stable society that promotes human flourishing amid religious diversity. First, the Swiss population voted in favor of a ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/01/1105 Americans may soon be, if they aren’t already, sick of hearing about the blockbuster film Avatar. The quality of the script is sufficiently thin to justify impatience with extended engagement. And yet, responses to the film are revealing enough to extend the lease on the discussion—not to understand Avatar as ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/01/1095 In issuing the “Manhattan Declaration,” Christian leaders across the nation declared their intent to stand for the dignity of the unborn and the institution of marriage even up to the point of civil disobedience. Unsurprisingly, this declaration has spurred much commentary, not all of it sympathetic. One could predict the ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/01/1090 On December 25th, 2009 reports began to emerge about an attempt to explode Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit. The accused perpetrator was identified as Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Then came news of Abdulmutallab’s connection to Yemen. And now the Yemenis are trying to leverage this to obtain additional “counterterrorism” ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/01/1086