A Book I Just Read

Excellent.  Probably the most amazing voyage in the Age of Discovery.  If I had one word to summarize it: cannibals
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A Book I Just Read

Very entertaining and well written.  Josh recounts his year preparing for the U.S. memory competition, his interviews with competitors and scientists having to do with memory, and gives the reader a brief history of memorization in education.  If you want to learn how to profoundly increase your memory, this is a good book with which to start.  It should be required reading for people in the profession of educating children, even better, the classics he mentions which lay out the fascinating memory techniques almost all of us have forgotten.

Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism

Alvin Plantinga reviews Philip Kitcher's new book:

"The central purpose of this book," according to the preface, "is to show how a thoroughly secular perspective can fulfill many of the important functions religion, at its best, has discharged" (p. xiii). Philip Kitcher concedes that this may take a while: "a fully rewarding secular world cannot be built in a day" (p. 2). Kitcher seems genuinely sympathetic to religious concerns, and genuinely concerned to understand them. He writes with sensitivity and insight. He has an attractive style and writes well (although it isn't always easy to tell precisely what he means to say).

Kitcher begins (chapter 1) by explaining why he rejects religion. Here he is more nuanced and less bombastic than the dreaded new atheists, who, as he suggests, overlook the central role religion plays in the lives of most of the world's population: "Yet the atheist movement today often seems blind to the apparently irreplaceable roles religion and religious community play in millions if not billion, of lives" (p. xiii). Nevertheless, he claims, religious beliefs, beliefs about "the transcendent" as he takes them to be, are "almost certainly false" (p. 105). I'll begin by outlining his suggestions as to how a secular outlook can serve the same functions and goals as religion; then I'll examine his arguments for atheism.